Sacred Host
by Qoheleth
Summary: Somewhere in the Yeerk pool, you know someone is doing this.
1. Gelathiir

Disclaimer: While I do not subscribe to the theory, common on this site, that it is ludicrous to suspect an author of writing fanfiction around his or her own works (I can, for instance, imagine Daniel Handler taking advantage of the freedom of ff to write stories about the Baudelaire orphans that wouldn't fit in the rigidly structured _Series of Unfortunate Events_), the fact remains that I am not K.A. Applegate, and do not own the _Animorphs_ books.

* * *

In a cage in the Yeerk pool, a girl was on her knees.

The girl's name was Teresa Sickles, and she was kneeling not so much for religious reasons – though that entered into it – as because it was a pleasure to be able to do so. She spent most of her life imprisoned in her own mind, unable to perform the smallest bodily task of her own free will; when her Controller unwillingly granted her forty-five minutes of liberty, therefore, she made a point of using every moment as well as she could.

Big, grand gestures were impossible, of course – her cage was only about six meters square, and she had seen too many hosts struck down for "tedious displays" to try anything so flamboyant as Tarzan yells or jumping jacks – but she could still do the little things: kneeling, humming hymns, making shadow animals on the cage bars, tugging her ear and whispering a Carol Burnett routine.

"When I'm released," she muttered – either to herself or to God, neither of whom reminded her that this was a fairly remote possibility – "I'll have to talk Mom into visiting the waterworks again. It's got to be three months since we've been there at all, let alone…"

Her voice trailed off as the sound of a disturbance caught her ears. A virile young Hork-Bajir was protesting mightily against the guards who were dragging him to his cage.

"No! No!" he shouted. "_Fhleut mi'kai! Hafrush fyc-ram tisowm!_ Free, you understand?"

He was putting up a good fight, Teresa had to admit it. Each of his captors bore several blade marks, from which purplish-blue blood was oozing profusely.

A supportive murmur arose from a pair of Hork-Bajir about six cages down from Teresa. "_Gelathiir,_" they chanted, "_gelathiir,_ _gelathiir..._" Judging from her limited knowledge of _Galard_, Teresa guessed that this meant something like "the one who stands for freedom".

The human hosts, having no better term in English, followed their lead. "_Gelathiir,_ _gelathiir,_" they chanted, until a subdued but distinct rumble could be heard throughout the pool: "_Gelathiir, gelathiir!_"

Teresa herself remained silent. What was it supposed to prove? That the Hork-Bajir was going to overpower the guards, escape from the pool, and become a beacon of freedom shining forth in the night? She knew better than that. Soon enough, it would all be over.

Yes, there it was. One of the guards had managed to reach his Dracon beam. Swiftly, he set it to one of the medium settings – seven, probably – and fired directly at the Hork-Bajir's forehead.

The _gelathiir_ fell, unconscious. He was clearly stronger than your run-of-the-mill Hork-Bajir, but one has to be very strong indeed to withstand a setting-seven Dracon beam.

"_Gelshla ku!"_ the guard shouted.

A nearby Taxxon-Controller scuttled up to the cage on Teresa's right and flung it open. The guards dragged the Hork-Bajir over to the cage and dumped him in, as one might dump a tattered beanbag chair into a moving van.

"_Tika,"_ one of them said to the Taxxon, tossing him a scrap of meat.

As the Taxxon scrambled for its tip, the guard who had knocked out the Hork-Bajir took out his Dracon beam again. He lowered the setting with a flick of his thumb, strode over to the two Hork-Bajir who had started the chant, and coolly shot both of them in the chest.

The Hork-Bajir screamed in pain. The setting hadn't been high enough to damage them permanently, but the message was clear: _Freedom is not an option for you. Do not behave as if it were._

Teresa sighed. She had been a host for about three years, and had seen many such incidents. Always, they ended the same way.

She had never entirely given up hope, though. Yes, she was a realist, but a realist with just enough leaven of optimism to keep her from despair – and it was this, combined with certain other characteristics, that would soon cause the Yeerk Empire to tremble at the sound of her name.


	2. A Word in Season

Several minutes later…

"This is holy ground," Teresa murmured, fully aware of the irony in the lyrics. "We're standing on holy ground… for the Lord is present, and where He is, is holy…"

"Well!" came a voice from just outside her cage. "So this is the great Hero of the Republic, is it?"

Teresa glanced sharply up, thinking for an insane moment that the words referred to her. She realized the next minute, however, that the human-Controller in front of her cage was actually addressing the Hork-Bajir on her right.

_"Gelathiir, gelathiir!"_ the Controller cried, bowing and waving her arms mockingly. "By all the Kandrona's wavelengths, you creatures just never learn, do you?"

The Hork-Bajir said nothing.

The human-Controller laughed, a dry, nasty snigger. "I'd just like to see you escape from here, you know that?" she said. "You couldn't possibly hide on this planet for very long – if we can't get some foolish human to find you and call the tabloids, we'd just follow the bark-stripped trees. And even if you could steal a starship, you'd still be too dumb to drive the thing. Maybe you expect one of the great and mighty Ellimists to come down and waft you away, hmm?" And with another nasty laugh, she walked away.

Suddenly, the Hork-Bajir snapped. _"Getul-kato-resker-dapsin!"_ he screamed. "Filth! Gef Makkil hates Yeerks! _Estud'mok!_"

The Controller paid no attention, and Gef was about to let fly some more choice phrases when Teresa murmured softly, "You shouldn't, you know."

Gef turned to stare at her. "What?" he said.

Teresa started. She hadn't meant him to hear her – but there was no turning back now.

"You shouldn't hate Yeerks," she said. "Hate what they do, sure… hate their arrogance… their cruelty… their filthy, disgusting government… but don't hate the Yeerks themselves."

Gef seemed amazed. "You are a host of the Yeerks," he said, "and you do not hate them?"

Teresa sighed. "I try not to," she said.

"Why?" said Gef.

Teresa, being only human, would have preferred to give any answer other than the true one, but for the life of her she couldn't think of a good natural-law reason why hosts shouldn't hate Controllers – so she took a deep breath and made the reply that would change the Galaxy.

"Because Jesus wouldn't want me to," she said.

* * *

"Jesus?" Gef repeated, trying out the word as if it were a new toy (which, given the Hork-Bajir attitude toward language, it may well have been). "What is Jesus?"

"He's the Being who created the universe," said Teresa. "You, me, your planet, my planet – Jesus made them all with a single word."

Gef considered this. "Jesus make Yeerks, too?" he asked.

Teresa nodded.

"Not good to make Yeerks," said Gef darkly. "Why Jesus do it?"

"I don't know," Teresa said. (Truth to tell, she had often wondered about that point herself.) "But I suppose they were good at one time, just like we were. Maybe before they sinned, Yeerks didn't have to infest people."

"Sinned?" Gef queried.

"Did wrong," said Teresa. "You know how you'll do something, knowing that you shouldn't, but you do it anyway?"

She was taking a risk here. The tendency of the twentieth-century human mind was to suppose that the Hork-Bajir, having no conception of deliberate cruelty, could therefore have no conception of sin. Teresa herself wasn't sure what sort of sin would convict a Hork-Bajir conscience; she simply took it on faith that, since no-one could say that the Arn were unfallen, the curse had to affect their tree-tending offspring.

And it seemed that she was right. Gef lowered his head, gazed pointedly at the ground, and murmured in a low voice, "Yes, I know."

"Of course you do," said Teresa. "We all do. It's a sickness in us, something that needs to be gotten out. Only, the only people who can get it out are us, and we're not strong enough to. Jesus would be strong enough to, but he's not us, so he can't. You see?"

If Gef had tried to follow this little speech, he would in all probability have quickly become restless and brain-weary, and the conversion of the Sulp Niar pool would have ended before it had begun. It is therefore pleasant to record that he did not, in fact, hear a word that Teresa said.

"Gef Makkil does wrong, yes," he murmured. "He does not want to, but he does. Gef Makkil is a miserable thing."

Teresa swallowed. "Yes, okay," she said, "but Jesus loves you anyway. He made you, and he loves you the way a father loves his child. Hork-Bajir have fathers, right?" she added, as an afterthought.

Gef nodded.

"Okay, then," said Teresa. "That's what Jesus is like. And to free you from your sin, he took the nature of a human and died on a cross, and if you repent and believe in him, you can be a new creation."

This was, perhaps, a rather hasty précis of Christian soteriology, but there was a good reason for its brevity: While Gef had been bemoaning his wretchedness, Teresa had noticed two Hork-Bajir-Controllers coming to take her from her cage, realized that she had perhaps thirty seconds more to talk to her fellow-slave, and resolved to run through the most important points as quickly as she could. Even as it was, she had had to shout the words "new creation" as the two guards dragged her away toward the pool.

It may be that this caused the phrase to have a greater impact on Gef's mind than it would otherwise have done. At any rate, he raised his head and called, "_Daklit?_"

Teresa, recognizing this as a _Galard _word meaning "young female", craned her head to look back at him.

"I would like to be a new creation," said Gef.

Teresa wished she could respond to this statement properly, but there simply wasn't time, so she had to content with a warm smile and a nod.

It was some time before she knew just how proper a response that had been.


	3. Introducing Two Yeerks

*Malcar Seven-Four-Five to the infestation pier! Repeat, Malcar Seven-Four-Five to the infestation pier!*

At the sound of the high-pitched clicks that made up this announcement, Malcar Seven-Four-Five of the Sulp Niar pool turned and glided swiftly through the mass of her fellow Yeerks to the shallow area of the pool where her host was unwillingly waiting. With a practiced motion, she attached her palps to the rim of her host's ear, flattened out her small, wormlike body, and slid into the ear canal to make contact with the brain.

«Well, hello, dear,» she telepathed to her host. «Did you miss me?»

Teresa Sickles did not reply, but Malcar felt her entire consciousness tense up suddenly, and she heard her whispering, «Carry it two miles, carry it two miles…»

Malcar smiled to herself. She had been Teresa's Controller for the better part of three years, and had learned innumerable ways to get under her skin (besides the literal way that was her birthright). This had gotten her in trouble with her immediate superior, Sub-Visser One Hundred and Sixty-Three, who believed that hosts should be assuaged whenever possible lest they become difficult to handle, but she carried on regardless. The truth of the matter was that nothing Malcar did could so irritate Teresa as Teresa's tendency, when left alone, to surrender uncomplainingly and "offer it up" irritated Malcar.

«So what have you been up to lately?» she murmured, and plugged into her host's recent memories, expecting to find nothing more exciting than forty-five minutes spent playing tic-tac-toe in the dust of her cage floor. Instead, of course, she found the series of events recorded in the previous two chapters.

Her surprise was so pronounced that a faint perception of it leaked unbidden into Teresa's consciousness. She had always thought of her host as a quiet, introverted sort of creature, not someone in the least likely to start impromptu theological discussions with wild Hork-Bajir. Such newfound assertiveness was, to the Yeerk, almost alarming.

Nor was this the only cause Malcar found for alarm. For some time, she had felt that the Yeerk High Command on Earth had not been paying nearly enough attention to Earthly religion as a possible source of host resistance. The neglect was, perhaps, understandable; the only significant religion on the Yeerk homeworld was a rather laissez-faire sun-worship, and their only contact with sectarianism on Earth was the semi-cultic elements that the current Visser One had incorporated so successfully into the early Sharing, so it was naturally difficult for a Yeerk to grasp that organized supernaturalism could ever be a formidable enemy. Malcar, however, was not so sure; she had found data in Teresa's mind that suggested that her religion, at least, was fully capable of toppling empires if it objected to their behavior – and surely it would consider the conquest and enslavement of entire races objectionable. For a moment, therefore, the discovery that Teresa had attempted, however hesitantly, to propagate her faith among her fellow hosts caused Malcar something like terror.

It was, however, only for a moment. Another blink of the eye, and Malcar was herself again. «Well,» she said. «Been doing a spot of missionary work, have you?»

«Maybe,» said Teresa.

«Well, good for you,» said Malcar. «Maybe he'll be a little more docile after this. "Slaves, be submissive to your masters", and all that.»

Teresa did not reply, but her thoughts were plain for her Controller to perceive.

* * *

*Toloth Two-Nine-Four to the infestation pier! Repeat, Toloth Two-Nine-Four to the infestation pier!*

With a gesture that, had he been a human, would likely have been a sigh, Toloth detached himself from the sweetly nourishing waves of Kandrona flowing into his body, swam over to the pier, and slithered into his host's ear canal. He was one of the few Yeerks in the Sulp Niar pool who did not look forward to reinfestation; in the first place, he had never quite seen the allure of vertebrate senses that so intoxicated many of his pool-mates, and in the second place, he considered asserting dominance over his current host to be rather more trouble than it was worth.

He was aware, of course, that this was a flaw in himself. Had he been a different sort of Yeerk – someone, for instance, like Malcar Seven-Four-Five – he might have taken a positive pleasure in his host's futile struggles to resist his control. But, as things were, he didn't.

This should not be taken to suggest, however, that Toloth was a conspicuously gentle soul. On the contrary, he was in nearly all respects a highly competent warrior – so competent, in fact, that he had attained a position on Sub-Visser One Hundred and Sixty-Three's personal guard without having recourse to the bribery that was usually standard in such appointments. He was, in fact, rather like certain human soldiers who feel no qualms about shooting perfect strangers in the heat of battle, but who would have difficulty smacking their own dogs with rolled-up newspapers.

It was with some trepidation, therefore, that he made contact with Gef Makkil's mind, bracing himself for the onslaught of abuse and defiance that the young Hork-Bajir would certainly begin to hurl at him as soon as he felt him commandeer his faculties – and it was with a sense of startled relief that he realized that Gef was doing nothing of the kind. Gef's mind, in fact, seemed to be preoccupied with something else entirely, something with which Yeerk tyranny and Hork-Bajir pride had little, if anything, to do.

A more inquisitive Yeerk – someone, again, like Malcar Seven-Four-Five – would have instantly turned to Gef's memory centers and scrutinized them meticulously to determine the cause of this sudden change of attitude. Toloth, however, had long since fallen out of the habit of checking his host's recent memories, on the not unreasonable grounds that a Hork-Bajir's thoughts are rarely worth perusing, and so it did not occur to him to do so now; he simply thanked the Kandrona for small favors and applied himself to the task of regaining control over Gef's limbs.

He had already staggered to his feet, and was getting ready to walk away from the pier, when Gef's voice whispered inside his head, «Toloth Two-Nine-Four?»

Toloth was startled. Not only was the softness of Gef's tone totally unwonted, but this was the first time he had ever heard his host use his given name. Generally, when Gef addressed him, it was as "Yeerk", "Yeerk filth", "_tuscad-ierig_", or some even less socially acceptable variant on the theme.

«Yes?» he responded cautiously.

«Yeerks know about Jesus?»

Toloth was silent for a moment. This was just getting stranger and stranger.

«Perhaps some Yeerks do,» he said finally, «but I don't. What is it?»

«Being who makes worlds with words,» said Gef. «Yeerks, too. Loves like a father, and dies to make new creation.»

There was a pause as Toloth digested this enigmatic response.

«Really?» he said. «And where did you hear about this?»

Gef did not respond. He had retreated back into his own thoughts, and Toloth was loath to follow, lest he provoke his host out of his current and quite desirable placidity.

It occurred to Toloth that there might, after all, be some value in analyzing Gef's recent memories; possibly they would shed a light on what he had just said, or at least cast it into complete sentences. Accordingly, he plugged himself into Gef's mnemonic cortex, and there discovered, as near as a Hork-Bajir brain could retain it, the complete substance of his recent conversation with Teresa Sickles.

It would be too much to say that Toloth was intrigued. Yeerk soldiers are not conditioned to be intrigued by anything a host life-form says. He was, however, interested. Like most Hork-Bajir-Controllers, he aspired someday to be promoted to a human host body, and it seemed to him that his chances were that much greater if he could demonstrate some real knowledge of humans – of their passions, their fears, their thought processes, and, presumably, their beliefs. If he could meet with this young human, and prevail upon her to elaborate further – which seemed unlikely to be difficult, since this knowledge appeared to be something that it was incumbent upon her to share – then, the next time a prominent human was captured and Sub-Visser One Hundred and Sixty-Three glanced around his echelon for an appropriate Controller, Toloth Two-Nine-Four would have an indisputable advantage over his fellows – an advantage that just might prove insuperable.

Yes – he nodded to himself, pleased with his reasoning. Clearly, knowledge of this Jesus was the key to worldly advancement. All that remained was to acquire such knowledge – and so he determined, at the next possible opportunity, to have a nice long talk with Miss Teresa Sickles.


	4. Without Benefit of Shamrocks

And thus it was that, three days later, as Teresa was just completing her third tic-tac-toe game (a draw, of course), a shadow fell across the floor of her cage, and she glanced upward into a familiar-looking Hork-Bajir face.

"Gef?" she said, somewhat startled.

"No," said the figure. "My name is Toloth Two-Nine-Four. I am _vag nitskaha temit_…" He frowned, and clamped down on Gef's Hork-Bajir instincts. "I am a lieutenant in the Sub-Visser's personal guard."

"Oh."

There was a moment's expectant silence.

"Well, I'm not going to curtsy, if that's what you're waiting for," said Teresa at length.

Toloth grinned. "From what I know of you, I scarcely expected it," he said. "It is not obeisance I require of you, but information."

"Information?" Teresa said with surprise, trying to recall any compromising data she might have inadvertently discovered about the Andalite guerrillas. "Like what?"

"Could you tell me, precisely," said Toloth, "what the name 'Jesus' means to you?"

Teresa stared. This was the last thing she had expected, and, truth to tell, one of the last things she had desired. A few pacifying words to a fellow slave was one thing; a detailed description of her faith for the benefit of one of her captors was something else entirely.

"Why, what has Gef been telling you?" she said, with an attempt at a laugh.

"Very little," said Toloth, without one. "That is why I desired a fuller explanation. Begin at the beginning, and omit as little as possible."

Teresa took a deep breath and sent up a prayer: _Okay, God, I'm not crazy about this, but if You'll stay with me, I think I can make it. Just don't let me mess up too badly._

So – begin at the beginning. The beginning. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and…" No, that was getting into too deep waters for a first discussion. Better to start one Gospel earlier.

"Okay," she said. "About two thousand years ago, an angel appeared to a girl named Mary…"

"Stop," said Toloth.

Teresa blinked. "What's the matter?"

"Nothing," said Toloth. "I merely require a clarification. What is an _angel_?"

"Oh," said Teresa. "It's a bodiless spirit that's directly in contact with God and, um, serves Him in various ways."

Toloth nodded. "I see. Please continue."

"This angel appeared to Mary," said Teresa, "and told her she was going to have a baby, and this baby was going to be the Son of God."

"Jesus had a son?" said Toloth.

"No," said Teresa. "The son was Jesus."

"Ah," said Toloth. "My mistake. I was under the impression that Jesus was your God."

"He is," said Teresa.

Toloth frowned. "You have two gods, then?"

"No."

Toloth's frown deepened. "Then… then Jesus is his own son?"

"Well… maybe, kind of," said Teresa, considering. "But not really… no. No, not at all."

Toloth stared at her for several seconds without speaking. When he did speak, it was with the cajoling tone of one who is trying to humor an irritatingly whimsical child.

"Human," he said, "I am sure that, in your mind, there is a perfectly straightforward answer for this little riddle of yours. I would appreciate it, however, if you would simply tell me what it is and not be coy about it."

"Okay," said Teresa, slightly nettled. "In the first place, my name isn't 'human'."

"Pardon?"

"You called me 'human' just now. My name is Teresa."

Toloth chuckled. "Willful little creature, aren't you?" he said. "Very well, then, _Teresa_. How are Jesus and his father both your God?"

Teresa closed her eyes, thinking of all the explanations of the Trinity she had ever heard or read, searching for one that was both complete enough to satisfy an advanced alien and simple enough that she could remember it all.

"Okay," she said. "You know the basic difference between person and nature?"

"I can't say I've ever thought about it," said Toloth.

"Okay," said Teresa. "Basically, _person_ is _who_ someone is, and _nature_ is _what_ something is. So, if I were to ask you _who_ you are, you would say… um, what's your name again?"

"Toloth Two-Nine-Four of the Sulp Niar pool," said Toloth Two-Nine-Four of the Sulp Niar pool.

"Right. So you would say, 'I'm Toloth Two-Nine-Four of the Sulp Niar pool,' because that's what describes you as a person. On the other hand, if I asked you _what_ you are, you would say, 'I am a Yeerk,' because that's your nature."

"I see."

"Now, once you realize that, of course, you realize that person and nature don't always have a one-to-one correspondence. For instance, if I asked, 'What is this?'–" Teresa slapped one of the bars of her cage with the palm of her hand "– you would say, 'It's a cage,' but if I asked, 'Who is this?' you'd just look at me funny."

"True enough," said Toloth.

"And the reason for that is that a cage nature is lesser than a human nature or a Yeerk nature," said Teresa, "so that cages have zero persons where a human or a Yeerk has one. But God's nature, if you stop to think about it, is incomparably _greater _than a human's or a Yeerk's…"

A light dawned in Toloth's eyes. "And so he has two persons? The one, Jesus, and the other, his father?"

"Three, actually," said Teresa. "There's also a Holy Spirit that I hadn't gotten to yet."

Toloth leaned back onto his tail and spent a few moments digesting this concept.

"That is subtle," he said at length.

"Thank you," said Teresa.

"Extremely subtle," said Toloth. "Simple, yes – remarkably simple, and yet…" He stopped, and attempted to put his confused thoughts in some kind of order.

"No Hork-Bajir would ever have thought of that," he said at last.

Teresa smiled. "Well, no human probably ever would have, either," she said. "We just happened to get it as a revelation."

"Hmm?" said Toloth. "Oh, yes, yes, of course." It was clear from his expression, however, that Teresa's disclaimer had not really sunk in.

"Well, thank you, Teresa," he said. "It has been very… very enlightening." Slowly, he lowered himself back onto his feet and walked off in the direction of the voluntary-host area.

Teresa leaned back in her cage and ran her fingers through her hair. Her mind, while not as busied as Toloth's, was nonetheless a jumble of thoughts, concerns, and prayers: _Did I get that right? Did it make any impact on him? How did I get into this situation, anyway, Lord?_

Eventually, however, one thought overwhelmed all the others by virtue of its sheer novelty. _I did it,_ she thought. _I just defended the Trinity to a Yeerk._

And hot on the heels of that thought came a second: _Holy cow, I'm an apologist. I'm doing what Scott Hahn does._

And then came a third thought, which, unlike the first two, Teresa wasn't quite convinced was her own: _Well done, good and faithful servant._

Taken together, the three thoughts constituted such a gratifying and nourishing reflection that Teresa's mind had no room for anything else, and she barely noticed when the guards came to take her to the pier. A soul that has fulfilled its calling has little time to be concerned with such trivialities as its own liberty.


	5. The Disconsolation of Philosophy

Toloth took an unusually long time to traverse the length of the Yeerk pool and rejoin his fellow guards. He knew that the Sub-Visser would not be pleased to find him missing so long, but somehow he could not make this knowledge real to himself; there was so much else to think about.

What he had said to Teresa, that no Hork-Bajir would ever have thought of the doctrine of the Trinity, was quite true, but it was largely a cover for the real issue, which was that Toloth felt uncomfortably sure that no Yeerk would have ever thought of it, either. This disturbed him greatly, as he was accustomed to thinking of his people as the natural overlords of the galaxy, and of all other races (with the possible exception of the Andalites) as so much livestock to be caught and exploited.

His anticipation of his talk with Teresa had been colored by this assumption. He had expected to hear simplistic myths of all-powerful figures who were obviously ill-disguised personifications of natural forces (akin to the Hork-Bajir stories of Mother Sky and Father Deep), and Teresa's mention of angels had seemed to him to fully justify these expectations – and then she had gone and stuck him with a concept so logical, so elegant, so dapsenly _sophisticated_, that it made the most profound conceptions of his own people's greatest thinkers seem banal and trivial by comparison.

He tried to tell himself that it was of no consequence, that the most incongruous survivals could be found in any culture's mythology, but it was no use. Logic kept forcing his mind back to a simple, necessary alternative: either the doctrine Teresa had just espoused was a creation of the human mind, or humans had gotten it from elsewhere. If the former, then the Yeerk invasion of Earth was based on a false principle, for it held that humans were weak-minded, easily-gulled simpletons, not a philosopher-race of such wisdom and shrewdness that it could scarcely be equaled anywhere in the galaxy. If the latter, that didn't mend things much, since a race has to be fairly intelligent even to receive such a concept; a Hork-Bajir, for instance, could never have processed it. (Toloth verified this last assertion with a quick glance at Gef's higher-thought centers; they showed fairly clearly that Teresa's explication of the Three-in-One had made no impact whatsoever on the young Hork-Bajir.)

And where could they have gotten it from, anyway? Either from some wandering philosopher from another world, such as a Skrit Na – which seemed to Toloth unlikely – or from… well, from the Being that they claimed it was from. There was really no third alternative.

"And what of us, then?" he murmured. "If humans are a race of either sages or prophets, what will become of the race that attempts to enslave them?"

This disturbing reflection so preoccupied his mind that he failed to look where he was going, and thus he did not see his fellow guardsman, Lissim Seven-One-Three, until he nearly collided with him.

"Whoa, careful, Toloth!" said Lissim with a chuckle (in Galard, of course). "Watch those blades! You're not a Gedd-Controller anymore, remember!"

"Oh," said Toloth, blinking. "My apologies."

"Where have you been, anyway?" said Lissim. "You've been gone for over an hour; the Sub-Visser's practically breathing fire."

"I…" Toloth began, and then hesitated, trying to figure out a description of his activities that Lissim would find comprehensible and not unduly alarming. "I was observing the human hosts," he said finally.

"Ah," said Lissim, with a knowing look on his face. "Of course. The eternally ambitious Toloth Two-Nine-Four, always seeking a leg up on the competition."

"Precisely," said Toloth.

"Well, I'm glad you've decided to finally rejoin us, at any rate," said Lissim, as the two of them turned back towards the pavilion where the Sub-Visser's entourage waited. "Though I dare say you'll be scurrying back there as soon as you spot an opportunity."

"I shall return, yes," said Toloth, with a backward glance at the young woman who was being dreamily escorted to the pier.

"In three days, I think, I shall return."


	6. The Hand of His Own Counsel

Three days, of course, is a long time to sustain an emotion, and, when Toloth returned to Teresa's cage the following Wednesday, his qualms about the Yeerk conquest of Earth had completely dissipated. He had not actually refuted his own arguments, of course; he had simply decided that anything so contradictory to the ideas he had believed all his life must be somehow erroneous. It was not a strictly logical thought process, but then Yeerks – as their history of emotional instability would indicate – are not a strictly logical race.

"You remember me, I trust," he said.

Teresa nodded.

"As you will recall," said Toloth, "I left rather hastily last time…"

"That's all right," said Teresa. "I didn't mind."

Toloth blinked. "I was not apologizing," he said.

Teresa's face hardened, and her tone grew sarcastic. "Oh, no, of course not," she said. "Forgive me for thinking that you might be."

Then, abruptly, she shut her mouth – shut it so tightly, in fact, that Toloth could see her lips whiten with loss of blood – and took a deep breath. When she spoke again, it was in a much softer and more measured tone.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm not always as calm as I should be about these things. Please forgive me."

In his entire life, Toloth had never had a host apologize to him for anything. It caught him off guard, and he mumbled the first meaningless courtesy that came to mind, which happened to be a _Desbadeen_ phrase meaning "My claws are retracted".

As Teresa did not know the _Desbadeen_ language, she was somewhat at a loss for a response. Conversation, accordingly, languished for a number of seconds.

"What was it you wanted to say?" said Teresa finally.

Toloth seemed to come out of a daze. "What?"

"You started to say something about the last time we met," said Teresa. "Then I interrupted you, and…"

"Ah, yes," said Toloth. "The last time we met, yes. If I remember correctly, you had just finished explaining to me how your God was three persons in one nature, and how one of these persons – the one you call Jesus, I believe – had become the son of a woman named Mary."

Teresa nodded. "Yeah, that sounds about right."

"Now why," said Toloth, "would a god do that?"

Teresa swallowed. She had never met anyone who was quite so gifted at coming to the point as this Yeerk.

"Jesus became the Son of Mary," she said slowly, "because we were sinful creatures, and we needed to be made right with God."

Toloth cocked his head. "And if Jesus took the form of a human, that would accomplish that?" he said.

"Well, it wasn't just the form of a human He took," said Teresa. "He took our whole nature upon Himself. He became as weak and vulnerable as a human, while at the same time staying as powerful as God."

Toloth frowned. "Is this another idea like the multiple-persons-in-a-single-nature one?" he asked.

"Um… sort of," said Teresa. "Actually, it's the reverse of that idea: instead of having three persons who all share one nature, with Jesus you have two natures combined in one person. So if you asked _who_ he was, you would only get one answer, but if you…"

Toloth nodded impatiently. "Thank you, Teresa, I do remember how the distinction works," he said.

_Calm, Teresa,_ the young apologist told herself as she felt her bile rise again. _Stay calm. He's a Yeerk, he's spent his whole life dominating other life-forms, he has certain mannerisms that are going to annoy you, but at bottom he's as much a child of God as you are. Remember that, and don't start snapping at him just because he's not as polite as his host._

"Right, okay," she said. "So Jesus was both God and a human. And that was important, because humans had gotten the world into a real mess. See, back when the first humans were created, the universe had been completely flawless; there was no suffering, no death, no evil, nothing. All of nature existed in perfect harmony with the Source of Eternal Goodness Who had created it."

"It must have been pleasant," Toloth murmured.

"I would assume so," said Teresa, "though I wasn't there, of course."

Toloth frowned in puzzlement. "What does that have to do with anything?" he said. "Of course existing in perfect harmony with a source of eternal goodness would be a pleasant experience. You don't need to experience it personally to realize that."

"Right, of course," said Teresa hastily, making a mental note not to rely too much on human humor when speaking to this particular inquirer. "The problem was, though, that God had given the first humans – their names were Adam and Eve – a way to disrupt that harmony. It seems there was a certain fruit-bearing tree in the middle of the garden where they lived, and God had told them that, if they ever ate the fruit off it, they would bring death into the world."

Toloth blinked. "Wait," he said. "Your God, your source of eternal goodness, provided the means for evil to enter the world. Is that what I am to understand?"

Teresa hesitated, and spent some moments considering the question before slowly responding, "Um… yeah, I guess so. But He didn't make them choose it, He just…"

Toloth waved his hand. "Never mind whether he made them choose it," he said. "If he provided the opportunity for evil to exist, then to that extent he was involved in its creation. Correct?"

"If you wanted to put it that way, I guess you could," Teresa admitted.

"All right," said Toloth – and it seemed to Teresa that there was a note of either triumph or relief, or possibly both, in his voice. "Now, if your God is the source of all goodness, and also the source of all evil, how is he distinguishable from nothing at all? Don't the scientists teach us that two contraries, when brought together, annihilate each other?"

"But God isn't the source of all evil," said Teresa.

"You just said he was," said Toloth, with that same curious note of a relieved sneer.

Teresa shook her head. "No, I didn't," she said. "I said that God permitted evil. And He does. But permitting something isn't the same thing as causing it."

"Isn't permitting evil itself an evil?" rejoined Toloth.

"No."

"Why not?"

In truth, Teresa had no idea. All she knew was that "God is not a tempter of evils, and he tempteth no man", and that therefore, if God permitted evil to exist, that permission could not itself be evil. In short, she was operating on faith, and hoping that her reason would come along for the ride – and, to the consternation of Rationalists everywhere, it did.

"Well, what's the alternative?" she said. "If you don't admit even the possibility of evil, then no one can ever reject evil in order to choose good. And that's the best kind of good there is, so wouldn't it be supremely evil to prevent it from ever happening?"

Slowly, the look of condescending triumph faded from Toloth's face, to be replaced by an expression of reluctant uncertainty. "Do you mean to say," he said slowly, "that good cannot be fully good unless it threatens itself with annihilation?"

"Phrase it however you want," said Teresa. She was speaking very quickly now, for fear that she would lose whatever was being poured into her if she stopped to think for too long. "You can say that God only permits evil so He can make good out of it. You can say that love that's compelled isn't really love. You can say that freedom is a greater good than existence. However you say it, it's true."

As soon as the last two sentences were out of her mouth, she suddenly remembered what sort of creature she was talking to. She clapped her mouth shut, and glanced up uncertainly at the enormous Hork-Bajir-Controller in front of her cage.

Toloth's expression had grown cold and unreadable. Without saying a word, he rose from his place on the ground, turned his back on the young apologist, and walked away from the row of cages.

Teresa flopped down onto the floor of her cage and sank her head into her hands. _I'm sorry, God, _she said silently. _I tried, I really did…_

And, for the second time in four days, a thought seemed to come to her from somewhere outside her mind. _Peace, child,_ it said. _You have done all that was needed for now. Leave the rest for another time._


	7. Beginning Things

Toloth had no intention of ever returning to the human girl's cage. The sense of betrayal that he felt concerning her was passionate, consuming, and, to an outside observer, all but inexplicable. Here this twin-lobed primate had been leading him on, making him think all kinds of nonsense about her God and her religion, when all the time it had been nothing more than a front for the freedom-and-equality cant that host organisms always pulled out when they wanted to justify their stupid, instinctive resistance to their rightful masters. Well, a threefold dapsen to that.

It would be unfair to the Yeerk soldier to imply that this was, even now, the only thought in his mind. A more philosophical part of himself – the part that had been so impressed with Trinitarianism – was still quietly suggesting that Teresa did not seem like the sort of creature to build up an entire epistemology merely to justify her own willfulness, that it was quite possible for an idea to lead to certain conclusions without having been conceived in order to justify those conclusions, and that, in fact, the child's idea of goodness as something that necessarily suggested the possibility of evil was rather intriguing, and might very well be worthy of further consideration. This part, however, would not regain control of Toloth's mind for several feeding cycles. Right now, his rage, annoyance, and frustration at being made to feel a fool overwhelmed all his other sentiments – including his desire to attain advancement by acquiring knowledge of the human mind. He understood the human mind quite well enough, now.

And there the matter might have rested, had it not been for Gef Makkil. Toloth had very nearly forgotten that it was his host who had directed him towards Teresa Sickles in the first place, and he was, consequently, somewhat surprised when, at the end of a particularly tedious day of following the Sub-Visser around at a distance of three paces, Gef broke into his thoughts with a hesitant, «Toloth Two-Nine-Four?»

Toloth sighed. «Yes, Gef, what is it?»

«Today is second day from last talk with Teresa,» said Gef slowly, like someone working out an unusually intricate chain of logic. «Tomorrow is third day.»

«Ah,» said Toloth. «So the little Hork-Bajir has learned to do math now. Well, what about it?»

«We go back tomorrow?»

«No,» said Toloth firmly. «We do not go back tomorrow.»

Gef thereupon lapsed into a reverie that lasted several minutes, and Toloth was just beginning to let his mind drift to the upcoming Esiln Kalkat festival that the Sub-Visser was rumored to be planning when the young Hork-Bajir spoke again. «Then I go back tomorrow,» he said.

«Excuse me?» said Toloth.

«When you go to feed,» said Gef. «Gef Makkil kill guards, escape from Sub-Visser's pool. Then go to big pool, meet Teresa.»

If Toloth had had a jaw, it would have dropped. «You cannot be serious,» he said.

Even as he said it, though, a glance at Gef's thoughts assured him he was wrong. In three years of infestation, he had never seen his host so resolute.

«But see here, you great lummox,» he said, «don't you realize that no Hork-Bajir can defeat the entire Sub-Visserial Guard single-handedly?»

«Is not easy,» Gef admitted.

«Is utterly impossible, more likely,» said Toloth. «And once they've taken you down, do you suppose they'll let you off with a warning again? Remember, this will be your second escape attempt in two weeks – and pool guards don't like repeat offenders.»

«No,» said Gef. «If Yeerks capture, will kill. But Toloth Two-Nine-Four not want Gef Makkil dead.»

Toloth hesitated. «Well… no, of course not,» he said. «You're a superb physical specimen; it could take me half a cycle to find an equally satisfactory host body.»

«Then we go back tomorrow?»

Toloth was silent for a moment, as he digested the implications of those five words. «Do you mean,» he said at last, «that you will deliberately get yourself killed if I don't go and talk philosophy to a human juvenile tomorrow?»

«Yes,» said Gef simply. «Gef and Toloth meet Teresa tomorrow, or Gef die.»

And Toloth knew there was no way of stopping him. If there was one thing that terrified Sub-Visser One Hundred and Fifty-Three, it was the idea of host revolt; he would never consent to let a known renegade live just to make life easier on a subordinate. And once Gef was dead, Toloth's hope of ever making it into the second century went down the sulp-niar sieve; the way Hork-Bajir bodies were rationed, it would be a miracle if he remained in the Sub-Visser's guard.

Toloth groaned quietly to himself; there must really be something wrong with him. Bad enough to be bamboozled by the philosophical double-talk of a human, but to be strategically outmaneuvered by a Hork-Bajir…

«All right,» he said. «We will go back to Teresa's cage tomorrow. But could you please tell me, you great squamous imbecile, just _why_ this human girl is so infernally important to you?»

Gef hesitated, and Toloth watched him attempt to put his half-felt emotions into coherent thoughts. «Teresa have knowledge of beginning things,» he said at last.

«Beginning things?» Toloth queried.

«Yes,» said Gef. «Things that make life, that know why things live. No point in living without knowledge of beginning things.»

«I see,» said Toloth. «And just what good does it do you to listen to Teresa talk about "beginning things", since you can't understand two consecutive words she says?»

«It does good,» said Gef firmly.

Toloth sighed. «Oh, have it your way,» he said.

«I do,» said Gef. «Tomorrow.»


	8. The Power of an Endless Life

Teresa's mood, as she lay in her cage on the following day, was not the sunniest it had ever been. It happened to be a Sunday, and attending Mass as the unwilling slave of a cheerfully pagan alien parasite was not one of Teresa's favorite things to do. (She could remember a time, a few years before, when Sundays and holy days had been the high points of her week; now, she looked forward to them with something like dread.)

And, of course, the events of the previous Thursday had done nothing to improve matters. Indeed, Malcar, inspired by the responsorial psalm, had spent nearly the entire hour reflecting on what a shame it was that Teresa had made that terrible faux pas with Toloth, and how unlikely it now was that she would ever get another chance to "make known His deeds among the Gentiles" in the form of the worthy Gef Makkil. What had made this particularly disagreeable was that Teresa fully believed Malcar to be right.

So all that Teresa wanted to do, now, was curl up in her cage, close her eyes, and shut out the rest of the world, and it was with a good deal of annoyance that she heard a kind of metallic twanging and realized that someone was banging on the bars of her cage. She opened her eyes and looked up wearily – and then her jaw fell open as she recognized the figure in front of her.

"Toloth?" she whispered.

"Listen to me, human," said the Hork-Bajir-Controller. "There are a few rules we will be observing from now on. In the first place, you will answer only the questions that I put to you, and not attempt to inject your own attempts at profundity. In the second place, you will not discuss this conversation with any of your fellow hosts, and you will encourage your Controller, if she knows what is good for her, to keep silent about it as well. In the third place, I don't care what your name is; you are 'human' so far as I am concerned. Is that clear?"

It is, perhaps, a violation of the hagiographer's code to mention that Teresa's immediate emotion, on hearing this, was a rather uncharitable gratification that someone, at least, was in an even worse mood than she was. Nonetheless, it is the truth.

"Perfectly," she said.

"Good," said Toloth. "Now. The last time we spoke, you told me that your god Jesus became a human because humans were sinful. Explain to me, please, how the two things are related."

Teresa had to think about that for a moment. She had accepted the fact of Christ's redemptive suffering for as long as she could remember, but she had never really concerned herself with the reason for it, and every exegesis she'd ever read on the subject had only served to confuse her.

"Perhaps I should have mentioned," said Toloth, after a few seconds had passed, "that I will be expecting your answers to be prompt, as well as to the point. My time is quite valuable to me, and…"

"Okay, okay," said Teresa. "How do you usually get rid of sin?"

This wasn't at all how she had expected to begin. She had been thinking, when Toloth interrupted her, of Robert Farrar Capon's theory that perverted creation can only be sanctified by a completely unperverted priest – a bit of mysticism which would likely have made little impact on the ruthlessly practical being in front of her. At the last moment, though, a completely different and far vaguer glimmer of thought occurred to her, and spilled out her mouth without her conscious volition.

Toloth seemed to be as surprised as she was. "What?" he said.

"How do you get rid of sin?" Teresa repeated, with a decision that would have convinced any observer that she knew what conclusion she was leading towards. "Come on, it's a simple question."

"I was under the impression that I was asking the questions," said Toloth.

"If you answer me this one, I won't ask you another one," said Teresa. "Now come on. How do you get rid of sin?"

Toloth sighed; it seemed to him that the initiative was slipping from his grasp once again. "A Yeerk philosopher," he offered reluctantly, "once said that every wrong thing done requires a right thing done as well, and every injury inflicted on another requires an injury inflicted on oneself."

It crossed Teresa's mind that it was typical of a Yeerk to jump straight to expiation without even discussing repentance, but she kept that observation to herself. "Okay," she said. "So sin carries a price with it, right?"

"Is that another question?" said Toloth, his eyes narrowing.

"Um, no, not really," said Teresa. "That's a statement. Sin carries a price."

"All right."

"And the price gets bigger the more sins you commit," said Teresa. "A lifetime of theft requires more expiation than a single candy bar swiped from a checkout counter when you were twelve. So you can just imagine what the cost is when you add together all the sins that have ever been committed, or ever will be committed, anywhere."

Toloth inclined his head wordlessly.

"It's a lot more than a human being can pay," said Teresa. "Or even all the human beings in the world put together. The only one who could pay a price like that would be God – but if God paid it, it wouldn't mean anything, since it's humans who incurred the cost, and it's humans who have to pay it." She hesitated. "That is, humans and Yeerks… and Andalites… and Hork-Bajir, I guess…"

"_Sellthee_," said Toloth.

Teresa blinked. "What?"

"The word you are searching for is _sellthee_," said Toloth. "Sentient beings that dominate their planets."

"Oh," said Teresa. "Is that Galard?"

"Yeerkish," said Toloth. "Coined by Akdor One-One-Five-Four shortly after the beginning of the Andalite War."

This didn't strike Teresa as a recommendation for the term, but she decided to live with it for the time being. "Okay, fine," she said. "_Sellthee _incurred the cost, so it had to be _sellthee _who paid it. But only God was even capable of paying the cost, so it had to be God who paid it. So there was only one way to solve the problem."

Here she paused, waiting for Toloth to finish the thought. She had, however, forgotten about Toloth's newfound determination not to get drawn into dialectic with her. Instead of responding, the Yeerk soldier simply stared at her for a number of seconds, and then prompted, "Yes?"

"Um… God had to become a _sellthee_," Teresa said.

She wanted to kick herself. It seemed like such an inadequate way of expressing the central mystery of her faith, and it was only made worse when Toloth corrected her grammar. "A _sellith_, you mean," he said. "_Sellthee _is plural."

"Oh," said Teresa, flushing. "Right."

There was another pause.

"Is that all?" Toloth inquired.

Teresa sighed. "Yeah, I guess so," she said. "As the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God and Man is one Christ; who suffered for our salvation, descended into Hell, rose again on the third day from the dead. This is the Catholic Faith, which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved."

And having given this remarkable abbreviation of the Athanasian Creed, she sank back down onto the floor of her cage and shut her eyes, and Toloth, perceiving that there was no further point to his remaining, rose and walked silently away.

«Well, my little _gelathiir_,» he said silently, «does that satisfy your craving for "beginning things"?»

But Gef's mind was still processing Teresa's last remark. «Saved?» he said. «Gef Makkil not saved if he not believe Jesus?»

«That's what the human said,» said Toloth.

«Then Gef believe,» said the Hork-Bajir with an air of decision. «What Gef do if he believe?»

«What?» said Toloth, with a sudden sinking feeling.

«What Gef do if he believe Jesus?» Gef repeated.

«How should I know?» Toloth demanded. «Do I look like a student of human religions?»

The correct answer, given Toloth's recent activities, would probably have been "Yes", but Gef did not bother to give it. «Teresa know,» he said. «Teresa believe. We go back three days, Teresa teach Gef how to believe.»

Toloth wanted to scream. _No host body is worth this,_ he thought.

But then he saw an image of himself sent back to the ranks of Gedd-Controllers – or, worse, quasi-Controller of the mindless appetite of a Taxxon – and he knew, even as he cursed himself for the weakness, that he would suffer countless humiliations rather than accept that fate. He was a slave to his own ambition, and the fact that he fully realized it made things no easier.

«All right,» he said. «Three days. Fine. And then again three days after that, I suppose. You and the human Teresa can make a regular ritual out of it, if you like. After all, it isn't as though I have any particular life of my own to lead. I can find perfect contentment just shuttling my host in and out of the Sulp Niar pool so he can become a more perfect professor of the Jesus cult. Nothing would please me more.»

Hork-Bajir do not generally have a finely developed sense of irony. The only thing Gef picked up from this impassioned speech was the basic idea that Toloth had acceded to his request, and so he responded, with perfect simplicity, «Good.»

And Toloth fumed in silence all the way back to the Sub-Visser's Bug fighter.


	9. Holiday Complications

When he arrived at the Bug fighter, however, he walked into a scene of such remarkable uproar that it drove his collected resentments completely out of his mind. Sub-Visser One Hundred and Fifty-Three was standing in the center of a cluster of Taxxon-Controllers, berating them with all the vocal and histrionic power at his human host's command, and all the Taxxons were defending themselves simultaneously with the standard hisses and sputters of Taxxon speech. The result was a cacophony of mismatched noise that, had he been a student of Earthly literature, would have reminded Toloth of the divine judgment on Pandaemonium in Book X of _Paradise Lost_.

He strained his ears to make out individual words, in the hope that he might thereby determine the cause of the quarrel, but to no avail. What little he could catch of the Sub-Visser's tirade consisted solely of derogatory epithets applied to the Taxxons, and the Taxxons themselves, who rarely enunciated their speech precisely at the best of times, were now slurring and distorting it so badly that they could easily have been discussing the currency question on SNC-244. He decided, therefore, to seek out more efficient sources of information.

"What's all the ruckus about, Lissim?" he whispered to his fellow guardsman.

Lissim Seven-One-Three chuckled. "Oh, our comrades-in-sixteen-arms over there failed to procure the necessary supply of _chawkwa_ seeds to make _illutillagh_," he said. "So now the Sub-Visser's chewing them out about how they expect to have a proper Esiln Kalkat festival without a tactile revel."

It is a mark of the importance of a shared culture that this summary of the situation, which will doubtless seem completely meaningless to the non-Yeerk readers of this story, not only conveyed a definite idea to Toloth, but also sounded a note of alarm in his mind. "Esiln Kalkat," he repeated. "Dapsen, I'd forgotten all about that."

"Well, you won't likely forget it again," said Lissim. "It's only three more days till the festivities start, and you can bet your host's wrist blades that the Sub-Visser won't let anyone on this fighter think about anything else in the meantime."

"No," Toloth murmured. "No, I suppose not."

"He certainly takes it seriously," said Lissim. "I suppose it comes of being a human-Controller. I've never been one myself, but they tell me that humans have a set of senses that have to be experienced to be believed." He laughed. "If I knew any human-Controller I really trusted, I think I might try swapping hosts with him for a day, just so I could do the Kalkat properly."

"If you knew a human-Controller you really trusted," said Toloth dryly, "you would be so busy writing your _hassatiss _that you wouldn't have time for Kalkat celebrations."

Lissim chuckled. "Touché."

(Here, once again, a certain knowledge of Yeerk culture is necessary. The _hassatiss_ is the report that a Yeerk explorer is obliged to make to the Council of Thirteen when he has discovered "hitherto unknown wonders or prodigies". It will be recognized that there was no great love for human-Controllers among the Empire's Hork-Bajir-wearing soldier caste.)

"Still, it would be something, wouldn't it?" Lissim continued. "To slither into a human skull cavity, connect to that odd, bifurcated brain of theirs, and just drink in all the sights and tastes and textures there are in the world. Wouldn't it just twist your dominical nodes?"

Toloth sighed. "Perhaps so, Lissim Seven-One-Three," he said, "but I suspect that, if you actually entered a human mind, you might find other things that would twist them even more."

Lissim turned and stared at him, but, before he could ask what he meant, a commotion arose on the other side of the Bug fighter's deck. The Sub-Visser, it seemed, had identified the Taxxon-Controller on whose shoulders (figuratively speaking) the responsibility for procuring the _chawkwa_ seeds had principally rested, and had casually pulled out a Dracon beam and trained it on his belly. The Taxxon-Controller was now clicking his claws together frantically and making an odd burbling noise that one rarely hears from a Taxxon, since Taxxons, in their native state, generally have little opportunity to plead for mercy.

"I'm sorry for this, Temrash Six-Nought-Three," said the Sub-Visser. "If your host could stand up to torture better, I'd find some other penalty for you. But since I've never known a Taxxon to manage more than two minutes in the _gnielza_ without its skin being fatally torn…" He shrugged, and turned to his attendant guards. "All non-Taxxon-Controlling personnel have twenty seconds to get back into the pool area. If, at the end of that time, someone still remains inside this Bug fighter and finds himself in the company of seven blood-crazed Taxxons, I will not be responsible for the consequences."

There was a sudden scramble for the Bug fighter's hatch, in the course of which several of the guards, including Toloth, received minor nicks and cuts from each other's blades. (Fortunately, none of these drew enough blood to distract the Taxxons from the Sub-Visser's hovering Dracon beam.) Once they were all safely outside the ship, they heard a low _tseew_, followed by the sound of seven mouths tearing and gobbling, and the Sub-Visser exited his fighter with the expression of someone who has performed a tedious but necessary duty.

Had Teresa Sickles been there, she probably would have shuddered uncontrollably and said a quick prayer for Temrash Six-Nought-Three's soul, but Toloth was barely stirred. He had been in the Sub-Visser's guard too long to be discommoded by a little thing like the killing of an unsatisfactory subordinate – and, anyway, he had other things on his mind.

Esiln Kalkat. The great festival of infestation, which only occurred once in a Yeerk's lifetime. The one day when you could count on a Yeerk to be inside her host – and it was in three days.

Now Toloth was faced with a terrible dilemma. If he went up to Teresa's Controller while she was outside the pool and required her to leave her host so he could talk to that host about the beliefs of Christians, the Controller would have plausible grounds to accuse him of treason by sympathy with a subject species (he was skirting close to that as it was), and getting sentenced to death by Kandrona starvation was no way to spend Esiln Kalkat. On the other hand, if he failed to show up at Teresa's cage in three days, he already knew what Gef would do – and there was no point in trying to explain the situation to him. Hork-Bajir didn't even have a concept of festival days; how could Gef be expected to appreciate the problems this one caused?

Toloth grinned wryly to himself. _Well, Jesus?_ he thought. _Teresa says that you're all-powerful; surely you could find a way to solve this little difficulty of mine. After all, it wouldn't do to let it get out that you let poor Gef be killed just because he's interested in knowing about you._

Much later, when telling the story of his conversion to his Ongachic biographer Thraqa-Tulluq, he would refer to this, ironically, as the first time he ever prayed. At the time, however, nothing could have been further from his mind than that Teresa's imagined _sellith_/god/pantheon would actually provide him with a recourse – and he was, therefore, completely unprepared when the Sub-Visser, who had pulled out a sub-Z holographic communicator and been speaking on it while Toloth had been brooding, suddenly snapped it shut with an audible _click!_ and muttered a foul imprecation against the Skrit Na race.

"What is it, Sub-Visser?" said Kythel Three-Eight-Four.

"I just made contact with the only Skrit Na ship currently on Earth," said the Sub-Visser. "They do have a supply of _chawkwa_ seeds on hand, and they're perfectly willing to barter with us for them, but, for whatever inscrutable Skrit-Na reason, they refuse to allow more than two sentient, non-Skrit-Na life-forms on board their ship on this particular week."

"Oh," said Kythel. "So you can't take more than one of us as a guard. Well, that's frustrating, of course, but…"

"Kythel Three-Eight-Four," said the Sub-Visser sternly, "if you're starting to think with that bark-stripping brain you're wrapped around, maybe it's time we dropped you back in the pool for a year or so. _Two_ sentient beings, I said. The Skrit Na consider hosts to be sentient beings."

Kythel's eyes widened. "Oh," he said. "So you would have to go in without any guards at all."

"Which is one thing I have no intention of doing," said the Sub-Visser. "For all I know, this particular ship has just sold out to the Andalites, and only invented this taboo so they could present a Sub-Visser's head to old man Lirem. No, this is definitely a job for one of my loyal guards." He glanced around at the Hork-Bajir-Controllers, his human eyebrows raised. "Let me see, how about…"

Toloth suddenly realized, with a start, that here was his opportunity. The Skrit Na were the galaxy's most inveterate packrats, and they collected knowledge the way they collected everything else. If he could get one of them to provide him with information on Christian doctrine, it was just possible that Gef would be deterred from seeking out Teresa again.

"If you please, Sub-Visser," he said, "I would like to volunteer myself for this task."

The Sub-Visser blinked, evidently startled. "You, Toloth Two-Nine-Four?" he said. "Why?"

"Because I have never seen the inside of a Skrit Na ship," said Toloth, at a venture, "and I would like to broaden my horizons."

The instant it was out of his mouth, he realized what a stupid answer it was, and his heart sank, for he felt sure that his real purpose would now be obvious. He was therefore somewhat surprised when the Sub-Visser laughed aloud.

"You mean you want to ingratiate yourself with me by appearing loyal and devoted," he said. "Well, good for you. I hope you're watching this fellow, men," he added, turning to his other guards. "He's the most sterling subject of the Yeerk Empire I've seen since the mid-cycle began. He'll end up a Council Member someday, if he doesn't forget himself and actually say what he thinks at some point."

As his fellows shot various looks at Toloth – some of disdain, some of admiration, and some of annoyance that they hadn't thought of it first – the Sub-Visser cocked an ear towards the Bug fighter. "Sounds as though your comrades have finished their business in there," he said. "Either that or they've all killed each other. Well, let's clamber back in and take Toloth the Sly out to the rendezvous point."


	10. An Unlikely Ally

The rendezvous point, in true Skrit Na fashion, was located in the most God-forsaken corner of the Sonoran Desert that the _chawkwa_ traders could find. Fortunately, it being early December, the temperature was relatively reasonable – only 81 degrees Fahrenheit, as opposed to the 110 or 120 that the same spot might have achieved in mid-August – but, still, Hork-Bajir are not desert animals, and when Toloth stepped out of the fighter and felt the dry, parched air hit his borrowed skin, he found himself wishing that the Skrit Na captain could have found some equally isolated spot somewhere in the Cascades.

"All right, Toloth Two-Nine-Four," said the Sub-Visser. "You have half an hour to negotiate a trade price for the _chawkwa_ seeds. If you fail…" He trailed off ominously, and glanced at a pale-yellow bloodstain on the floor that was left over from Temrash Six-Nought-Three's untimely demise of an hour before.

Toloth nodded grimly, and strode toward the preposterous, discus-shaped spacecraft sitting on the New Mexico sand.

* * *

A Na scuttled forward to greet him as he entered the ship. "Welcome, welcome, most noble and puissant Yeerk warrior!" he said in his thin, reedy voice. "As captain of the scavenger vessel _Bisumalkan_, I extend the most cordial greetings of the Skrit-Na people to you and your host. May I interest you in some exotic Talapsee refreshments?"

"I would like to see the _chawkwa_ seeds," said Toloth.

"Of course you would," the Na captain readily agreed. "A race so thoroughly practical as your own has little time for pleasantries. Right this way, please."

He turned and scurried toward the back of the ship, bounding along Na-fashion on his knuckles and the balls of his feet. Toloth laboriously followed after him, his horns scraping against the absurdly low ceiling as he did so.

«He is big talker,» Gef observed.

«He's a Na,» said Toloth briefly. (He no longer found it odd or alarming when his host struck up conversations with him out of the blue like this; if he thought of it at all, he accepted it as part of the general degradation that had come upon him when he gave in to Gef's blackmail.) «They're all in love with the sounds of their own voices.»

«Toloth know Na?» said Gef, sounding interested.

«Me?» said Toloth. «Certainly not. I've never even seen one before today.»

«Then how Toloth know what they are like?»

«I just do,» said Toloth, who had no intention of attempting to explain the concept of general report to his bark-eating host. «Now shut up and let me concentrate. I'm going to need all my wits about me in a few minutes.»

Gef, who was completely ignorant of his Controller's plans, assumed that he was referring to the negotiations for the _chawkwa_ seeds, and obligingly fell silent. Toloth followed the Na captain through the maze of corridors that made up the _Bisumalkan_'s storage hold, until suddenly the latter stopped, reared back on his hind legs, and indicated a large crate propped against the wall. "Your _chawkwa_, O valiant one," he said. "I regret that I cannot present it to you properly, but, alas, the amount your Sub-Visser requested is more than my poor limbs can handle. However, you, using as you do the majestic arms of a young and virile Hork-Bajir, will doubtless find it a simple matter to…"

Toloth ignored him and lifted the lid of the crate. Inside were _chawkwa_ seeds, certainly, although it was hard to recognize _illutilagh_ – the soft, tingling liquid in which Hawjabran emperors bathed – in the small, brown, utterly unexceptional seeds in front of him. Still, as a Yeerk, Toloth knew as well as anyone in the galaxy how little appearances ultimately counted for.

He ran his hand through the box, searching for any seeds that felt flaccid against his palm. Finding no more than the acceptable number, he nodded and replaced the lid. "Your merchandise is satisfactory, captain," he said. "On behalf of Sub-Visser One Hundred and Fifty-Three, I extend my thanks."

The captain bowed in a manner reminiscent of an Oriental kowtow. "It is an honor to be of service to so illustrious a personage," he said. "If there is anything else that my humble ship can provide, please do not hesitate to…"

Toloth cleared his throat. "Actually, there is one other thing," he said.

"Name it, O mightiest of the sons of Silat," said the captain.

Toloth took a deep breath. "I don't suppose that you are familiar with it," he said, "but there seems to be a major religion on this planet that centers around a figure called Jesus. If, in any of your travels, you should happen to come across some source of information about this religion, I would be interested in…"

He trailed off. An expression was coming over the captain's face that he didn't quite know how to categorize, for the excellent reason that no non-Na had ever seen such an expression on a Na face in recorded history. Ever since the Great Persecution (a period in Skrit-Na history roughly coeval with Earth's Oligocene, when an alliance of ten alien races – including the Five – had decided that the newly-Z-space-capable Skrit Na were a threat to the order and stability of the Galaxy, and had duly attempted to exterminate them), every Na had been trained from pupation to keep his distance from aliens, to let them view him as an occasionally useful but ultimately insignificant curiosity, and, above all, to never show them any genuine emotion. Over the course of thirty million years, this training had hardened into something almost like instinct: many Na were not physically capable of showing emotion to an alien, and most of the rest could only do so under the influence of a severe shock – such as, it seemed, the one Toloth had given the captain by mentioning the name of Jesus.

"Is it possible?" the captain whispered. "Has the Word then reached even to the Visserarchy of the Yeerk Empire?"

"The Word?" said Toloth, puzzled. "What word?"

"_The_ Word," said the captain. "The gospel of Jesus Christ, which brings the hope of salvation to all fallen beings."

This bit of pious rhetoric was not terribly illuminating to Toloth, to whom "salvation" was a move in the Korla strategy game _kree-ulorrd_, and "fallen beings" meant members of subjugated races. However, if he had learned nothing about Christianity from the captain's words, he had learned something quite remarkable about the captain. "You don't mean to tell me," he said in disbelief, "that the Skrit Na actually _profess_ this human religion?"

"Indeed we do," said the captain. "Why should that surprise you? It is the task of my people to seek out the treasures of the universe; when we find the greatest treasure of all, why should we not partake of it?"

Put that way, it did seem logical. Toloth was acquainted with the tendency of collectors to take their little hobbies too seriously; the Skrit Na themselves were living evidence of that. As they collected various races' systems of philosophy, it was only natural that they should come to believe in them; probably every crackpot religion in the Galaxy had a few thousand followers among the Skrit Na.

"No," said the captain, "it is no wonder that our race has come to know the Lord. The wonder is that your master, the Yeerk Sub-Visser whose number I did not quite catch, should have done so. I know of the penalty that your Empire inflicts for sympathizing with host species; that a high official of that Empire should be so filled with the zeal for truth as to dare such a fate is as glorious a testimony to the power of Christ as has ever been recorded in this cosmos. I would fain speak with this blessed Sub-Visser, that I might hear from his own mouth how the grace of Christ has…"

"You misunderstand me, captain," said Toloth hastily. "Sub-Visser One Hundred and Fifty-Three has no knowledge of your religion. The information I seek is on behalf of my host, who has been persuaded by a young human female that this Jesus religion is worthy of his belief."

The Skrit Na captain cocked his head. "Indeed?" he said, sounding slightly disappointed but still basically pleased. "In that case, would you be good enough to extend your host's right hand?"

This request was so unexpected that Toloth complied automatically before he had fully processed it. The captain's next action was even more disconcerting: he extended his own right hand, touched the tips of his fingers to those of Gef's, and wiggled them back and forth with an air of great solemnity for about seven seconds.

"Um… excuse me," said Toloth at length, "but may I ask what you are doing?"

The captain glanced up at him with an air of mild puzzlement, as though surprised that he should have to ask. "I was greeting my brother with a holy kiss," he said, "as is prescribed by the Sacred Scriptures."

Had Toloth been a student of xenoanthropology, it might have interested him to learn that a Skrit-Na kiss consisted essentially of what a human would have called an electro-shock handshake. As it was, however, it was another implication of the captain's words that interested him much more. "Sacred Scriptures?" he repeated. "There are holy writings associated with this religion, then?"

"Certainly there are, O noble one," said the captain. "If the Word is to truly be the Word, it must be written as well as spoken."

"Can you give me a collection of these writings?" said Toloth eagerly. A book: perfect. No need for self-righteous human females or bombastic Skrit-Na captains; whenever Gef wanted to know something, they could just consult the book.

"Nothing would give me greater pleasure, most illustrious Controller of my beloved brother in Christ," said the captain with a fresh kowtow. "If you will kindly excuse me one moment…"

He scuttled off through one of the storage-hold corridors, returning in about five minutes with a bulky volume bound in some red, shimmery material. Wordlessly, he extended it to Toloth, who took it and examined it critically. HOLY BAIBUL, said the _Galard _characters on the cover. (The fact that it was written in _Galard _surprised Toloth, who had expected it to be in either the original Earthly language or in the captain's own tongue. It occurred to him that perhaps the captain considered himself obligated to have a _Galard _copy available, on the off chance that an alien should someday express curiosity about the teachings of Jesus.)

He ran a claw over the smooth, red cover. "A curious binding, this," he said. "It almost feels like amber, yet I have never heard of amber this color."

"It is blood-amber," said the captain proudly. "You are perhaps familiar with the Djai'voro practice of making trophies from the blood of their enemies? We have discovered the crystallization process from them, and we use it to bind our Baibuls – in memory, you understand, of the most holy Blood that was shed at Calvary."

"Of course," said the mystified Toloth politely. "But if it comes to that, I have never heard of blood this color, either."

"It is not common," the captain admitted. "Apart from a few minor planets devoid of sentient life, the only modern ecosystem I know of that features red-blooded animals is that of Earth itself. Generally, therefore, the blood of Earthly sub-sentients is used for this sort of thing; I believe the material of that particular binding was taken from a large, grazing Earth-beast known as a cow."

"I see," said Toloth with a slight shudder. Like most Yeerks, particularly Hork-Bajir-Controllers, he had an innate aversion to unnecessary bloodshed, and the notion of carrying around a book bound with the vital fluids of an alien grazing animal was not a pleasant one for him. Nonetheless, if it had to be, it had to be.

"You are very kind, captain," he said. "However, your generosity presents a problem. There are a number of human-Controllers on board the Sub-Visser's Bug fighter, and, if I return to the ship with this… this 'Baibul' in my hand, they may possibly recognize it as a human religious text. As you have just now pointed out, the penalties for sympathizing with a host species are quite severe, and…"

"And you are unwilling to die for your host's beliefs," said the captain. "Quite properly. Let me see, perhaps a carrying dimension… or would they recognize that as well?"

Toloth blinked. "I doubt it," he said. "Why, what is a 'carrying dimension'?"

"A pocket in Zero-space," said the captain. "Tied to your host's biorhythms, so that it will remain in the same place relative to you at all times, and capable of concealing any object of a reasonable size. Here, I will make you one."

Before Toloth had a chance to either accept or decline this offer, the captain had scurried around a nearby corner, returning a moment later with a short, rounded rod that glowed purple at one end. He raised himself on his hind legs and made a number of movements with this rod in the air next to Toloth's upper right arm; then, with a quiet air of authority that was the most captain-like thing Toloth had noticed about him thus far, he took the Baibul from his hand and…

Toloth wasn't quite sure what happened next. As near as he could make it out, the captain had simply shoved the Baibul toward the patch of air that he had just been poking at with the rod, and the Baibul had obediently vanished. It looked like straightforward black magic, and Toloth couldn't keep from letting out a little yelp of surprise.

"The technology was Generational in origin, I believe," said the captain conversationally. "You will now be able to retrieve the Baibul at any time merely by placing your hand in the general area of the pocket and willing the Baibul to appear. Try it, I beg of you."

Hesitantly, Toloth did as the captain had described, and, sure enough, he found himself grasping the smooth, crystalline surface of the blood-amber binding. Then, to make sure he understood the principle, he willed it to go back, and it disappeared again. Then he took it back out and put it away again a couple more times, just for the fun of it. He might have gone on like this for quite some time, if he hadn't happened to catch sight of a Twelkish sulfur clock leaning up against the wall of the ship; it brought the idea of time into his head, and he suddenly remembered the Sub-Visser's warning about having half an hour to negotiate a price for the _chawkwa_ seeds.

"Well, captain," he said, straightening himself hastily, "you have indeed been most remarkably generous. There remains only the question of the payment you expect for your goods."

"Ah, yes, the payment," said the captain. "There will be no charge for the Baibul and the carrying dimension; I would be a wretched fellow indeed if I expected payment for my works of mercy. As for your _chawkwa_, I believe a portion of the claw on your host's right thumb would answer nicely."

The _sellith_'s mind is a curious thing. Toloth had realized, when he brought up the subject of costs, that the captain might well make some absurdly extravagant request, and that he would be forced to agree merely to meet the Sub-Visser's deadline. He had braced himself for this, and was fully ready, when the captain spoke, to concede anything short of the Sub-Visser's Bug fighter – and, as a result, when the captain set his price at a Hork-Bajir fingernail clipping, Toloth was utterly discommoded.

"A portion of my host's claw?" he repeated. "Come now, captain, that cannot be your whole request."

"That is the entirety of it, most eminent one," said the captain. "A bodily relic of the first Hork-Bajir saint is as worthy a treasure as I ever hoped to acquire; give me that, and you may have every _chawkwa_ seed that I possess."

The definiteness of his tone annihilated any lingering desire Toloth might have had to haggle. With a sigh, he pulled out his Dracon beam, flipped it to setting one, and seared off a chunk of claw with a grimace and handed it to the captain, who took it with more tenderness than most humans would have picked up a baby. This done, he lifted the case of _chawkwa_ seeds and made his way back out to the Bug fighter, wondering as he did so how he was going to describe this bizarre adventure to the Sub-Visser and his fellow guards.


	11. Except Some Man Should Guide Me

As it turned out, this was not really a problem. The Sub-Visser and his guards had all taken it for granted that negotiating with a Skrit Na would be a surreal experience for any rational being; the suggestion that the captain had sold Toloth a crateful of _chawkwa_ seeds in exchange for a fragment of Hork-Bajir claw struck them as simply par for the course. It never occurred to them to wonder whether there might be a logical reason for such behavior, and Toloth was in no way eager to suggest the notion to them.

Besides, no sooner had the Bug fighter lifted off from the desert ground than a dispute broke out between two of the Sub-Visser's attendants over whether the Esiln-Kalkat _illutilagh_ ought to be prepared in the classical style or according to the recipe of Prince Kokimmin. They were both very forceful in defense of their preferences (it occurred to Toloth that, had Hawjabrans been infestable, these two would have been in more danger of treason by sympathy with a subject species than he was), and, as the Sub-Visser declined to give an opinion one way or the other, the argument was allowed to continue until the ship arrived back at the Sulp Niar pool, at which point nobody on board wanted to so much as think about _chawkwa_ seeds anymore. Toloth was later to think of this as the third positive grace of God he received that day (the first two being the Na's two-sentient-beings requirement and the captain's happening to be a Christian), but at the time he merely noted his good fortune and put the matter out of his mind. Thus is gratitude, along with the other virtues, subtly quenched in the unbelieving soul.

Later that evening, as the Sub-Visser and the other guards began to lapse into _dulot_ – that curious state of semi-awareness by which Yeerks refresh their host bodies – Toloth discreetly slipped away to a deserted corner of the Bug fighter, and, taking his new Baibul from its carrying dimension, began to read the Word of God.

He himself, looking back on this, was never quite clear as to what exactly he expected to find. The idea of something like a catechism, beginning with the most basic first principles and leading in logical progression to the more abstruse doctrines, was perhaps vaguely in his mind. Whatever his preconceptions, however, he quickly discovered that the Christian Scriptures fulfilled none of them.

The book began with an account of the creation of the universe. This was, of course, no novelty to Toloth, who was familiar with the traditional creation myths of both the Hork-Bajir and the Kandronist Yeerks. What surprised him about this particular account, however, was how – well, how _dull_ it was. There was no hint of the lavish imagination that had made Lasra a protected citadel of the children of Kandrona, or the Hork-Bajir homeworld a gift from Father Deep to Mother Sky. Instead, there was simply a dry recitation, almost a checklist: God made light and found it good, and then He made Earth's atmosphere and found it good, and so on. It was almost as though the human who had written the account had been trying simply to establish that God had made the world and that the world was good, and had done his best to discourage his readers from bothering themselves about the details. Once again, Toloth found himself feeling uncomfortably like a barbarian intruding on a conference of philosophers.

He read on. The next few chapters seemed rather more like the sort of thing he was used to in religious texts, although even here the purely mythic elements seemed curiously subordinate to the philosophical and ethical ideas with which they were interwoven. He learned the details of Teresa's story involving the first two humans and the forbidden tree (apparently there had been a second sentient species on Earth at some point); he learned that the refraction of light was a symbol of God's mercy (or at least it was on Earth); he learned that linguistic barriers were a divinely instituted penalty for arrogance (then why didn't Andalites have any?). What he did not find, however – and what, after a while, began to puzzle him by its absence – was any reference to the name of Jesus.

After reading some seventeen chapters without learning anything about the figure who particularly interested his host, it occurred to him that perhaps the Skrit Na publishers had provided the Baibul with an index, and he turned to the end of the book. There he found, not an index (for a Skrit Na index appears at the front of a book, and looks so much like a table of contents that an alien might easily mistake it for one), but a collection of Scriptural commentaries by various illustrious Skrit Na exegetes. These, however, mentioned Jesus quite frequently, and Toloth concluded that they would meet his need equally well. With a sigh of satisfaction, he turned back the pages until he came to the beginning of this section, then settled back and began to read afresh.

By the time he had finished the fourth treatise, only his desire not to rouse his shipmates from their _dulot_ was preventing him from screaming aloud. If the Baibul proper had not told him enough about Jesus, the Skrit Na commentators were telling him a good deal too much – and none of it consistent from one author to the next. According to Maliudrip, Jesus was a human into whom God had infused a substance like His own; according to Birnakolless, he was a purely transcendent deity who merely seemed to be living the life of a human; and Ishmapurzel, as near as Toloth could make out, seemed to be saying that Jesus was a human whom God controlled the way a Yeerk controlled a host. Whether any of these was what Teresa believed, Toloth had no idea, but he was fairly certain that she couldn't possibly believe all of them.

The truth of the matter was that the Great Persecution had done more damage to the Skrit Na race than even the Skrit Na realized. Because of their inbred mistrust of aliens, they were all but incapable of submitting themselves to the guidance of a human teacher; after their 5th-century acquisition of a Constantine Bible, therefore, they had been left to their own devices in interpreting its teachings. As a result, they had, in a little under a thousand years, reinvented every major heresy in Earthly Christian history, as well as a few that their human brethren had never thought of. And, because their desire for concord between the faithful was greater than their desire for doctrinal purity, they cheerfully embraced mutually exclusive interpretations of Scripture with no more mental confusion than came naturally to their species.

Toloth, of course, knew nothing of this, but he saw well enough that neither the unsupplemented Bible, nor the Bible as interpreted by the ancient Skrit Na masters, was going to satisfy Gef Makkil's desire for saving truth – which left him with precisely the dilemma he had had before. Despite the apparent impossibility of the thing, if he wanted to preserve his chances of ever attaining to the Visserarchy, he would have to speak to Teresa Sickles on Esiln Kalkat. He had no other alternative.

He sighed. Well, he had three days to work out a plan; hopefully he'd be able to come up with something. In the meantime, he needed to get some rest.

With a weary gesture, he slipped the Baibul back into its carrying dimension; then he snuck cautiously back into the guards' chamber, slipped into his resting-slot between Lissim Seven-One-Three and Inmit Two-Three-One, and joined his fellow Yeerks in _dulot_.


	12. Parasites' Eve

In the portion of Jake Berenson's memoirs entitled "The Capture", he records a conversation he had with Temrash One-One-Four of the Sulp Niar pool shortly before the latter's death. According to Berenson, Temrash told him that the ancient Yeerks used innumerable species as hosts, over the course of millennia, before the Gedds evolved. Each of them had their strengths and weaknesses, but all of them provided Yeerks with senses and mobility, and that was the important thing.

Scholars are not yet agreed as to what Temrash was referring to, any more than they are sure about the identity of the "Ssstram" and "Mak" races that he said the Yeerks had conquered. (Indeed, this whole section of Berenson's memoirs is such a puzzle to historians that the human archaeologist Joanna Chude once jokingly suggested that the Animorphs should be prosecuted for killing Temrash One-One-Four. "Here they have someone who can scarcely open his mouth without revealing something that nobody else has ever guessed at, and they just wipe him out to save their own skins. It's like crushing the Rosetta Stone for fear that it contains radon.") Suffice it to say that the Temrashean version of Yeerk antiquity is not the version that Yeerks learn in school – and that, if it were, there would be little point in celebrating the festival of Esiln Kalkat.

For Esiln Kalkat (the words are Yeerkish for "let us acclaim the proto-conqueror") is the commemoration of Jimur Three-Four-Five, the semi-legendary figure who, one day during the mid-cycle of Generation 243 (later renumbered as Generation 1), swam curiously into the ear of a Gedd that had fallen into the deep area of his home pool, and thereby discovered the tremendous gift of which his entire race had hitherto been oblivious. Under his leadership, the Yeerk race conquered and tamed the Gedds, instituted the Council of Thirteen (with Jimur himself serving as the first Emperor), and generally began the transition from a community of intelligent slugs that swam in sulp niar and had a language based on clicks to the ancient and sophisticated civilization that so impressed Seerow-Iskillion-Atamis.

So much is recorded in the Yeerk chronicles, and generally confirmed by independent scholarship. What is less clear is when the idea arose of commemorating his great discovery with a night and a day of unbroken sensual revelry. Many historians, basing their theses on suggestions in certain ancient ballads and engravings, argue that the tradition is nearly as old as Gedd-based civilization itself, but no certain reference to it appears until the early-cycle of Generation 23, when Polip One-Three-Six, who then held the post of Council Member Five, issued a decretal condemning the excesses with which the festival had become intertwined.

"This festivity, known as Esiln Kalkat," she wrote, "was not instituted so that proud Yeerks might become debased through wanton appeasement of their hosts' appetites. Rather, its purpose is to bring them, through an extended immersion in the pleasures of the five senses, to a fuller appreciation of the great privileges that were hidden from our ancestors until the time of Jimur Three-Four-Five, that the reverence due to this great pioneer may never perish from the hearts of the Yeerk people."

It is probably safe to say that few modern Yeerks, even on the Council, think of Esiln Kalkat in quite those terms. Nonetheless, Polip's attitude is still reflected in the traditional air of solemnity that still hangs about the festival, and keeps it from being merely twenty-six hours of music, feasting, exotic baths, and stunning light displays, all tinged with a certain grandiose awareness of the Yeerk race's superiority to all vertebrate life. (Of course, for some aliens, this last is still all that is visible about the event. One of Prince Seerow's lieutenants, upon observing an Esiln Kalkat revel shortly after his arrival on the Yeerk homeworld, expressed his disgust with the practice by dubbing the holiday "Parasites' Eve". This was the first of many words and actions by which Alloran-Semitur-Corrass made himself noxious to the Yeerk people.)

However, the Five Revels – auditory, visual, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory – are still at the heart of the festival, and no Yeerk pool in the galaxy would consider letting the hundred and thirtieth day of the fourteenth year of a generation's mid-cycle pass by without setting up the necessary equipment for all of them. If, therefore, an uninfested alien (an Animorph, perhaps, on a spy mission) had managed to infiltrate Earth's Sulp Niar pool on December 17, 1997, his eyes would have been met by a bewildering sight: a pool nearly empty of Yeerks, all the cages ostentatiously open, a closed-off room from which dazzling flashes of color continually emerged, a swarm of Gedd-Controllers scurrying around on their mismatched legs and offering various elaborate foodstuffs to the other Controllers (who would sometimes take them and eat them, and other times simply inhale their aromas for five or ten minutes), a deafening rendition of something that resembled a Handel concerto for didgeridoo echoing from unseen speakers, and – most striking of all – a number of enormous vats, not much taller than a standing human but nearly a third the length of the pool itself, in which a strange, brownish-yellow substance fizzed and bubbled in a strangely appealing fashion.

And, if he had looked at the far end of one of those vats, he would have seen a young, rather plump human female, with pale skin and light-brown hair, immersing herself in the fizzing substance with an expression of intense pleasure – though he would, of course, have had no way of knowing that he was looking at the future Saint Teresa Sickles.

* * *

Malcar Seven-Four-Five wriggled in the _illutilagh_ bath, the better to make the tiny bubbles tingle against her soft human skin. She was in a state of mind that she rarely achieved, which was not so much a state of perfect serenity (though she herself mistook it for one) as a sort of conscious shelving of all other concerns so as to better enjoy the present moment. Her worries about Teresa's recent missionary activity, her schemes for capturing the boy in Teresa's class who had a crush on her, the nagging cloud of unfocused fear that hangs over every citizen of a police state: these things had not been abolished from her mind, but she was steadfastly refusing to think about them. This was the only day of her life that she would ever get to dedicate to wantonly satisfying the flesh, and she intended to milk it for all it was worth.

She extended a foot and touched her toes to those of her companion in the bath, Elskir Five-Oh-Seven. Elskir Controlled a girl named Kati, who lived just down the street from Teresa, and she and Malcar were, if not exactly friends, at any rate close colleagues and co-conspirators.

"So what do you think, Malcar Seven-Four-Five?" Elskir murmured.

"About what?" said Malcar.

Elskir shrugged. "Life," she said. "Championship Gedd breeding. The true identity of the Andalite terrorists. I'm not really particular, just so long as you're thinking about something."

Malcar smiled. "I didn't know it was important to think on Esiln Kalkat," she said. "I thought you were supposed to turn off your cognitive centers for twenty-four hours and just let your animal side run riot."

"Well, I suppose that's one way to do it," said Elskir, with a touch of austerity that would have won her the thorough approval of Polip One-Three-Six, "but, personally, I've always thought that a pleasure you're not allowed to think about isn't really much of a pleasure at all."

"Well, that's because you're a little intellectual snot," said Malcar.

"And you're a semi-barbaric anachronism," Elskir replied.

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

The two of them could have gone on like this for some time, had a low, rumbling sound from somewhere above Malcar's head not interrupted their badinage. "Forgive me for intruding," said a voice, "but is one of you Malcar Seven-Four-Five, the Controller of a human named Teresa Sickles?"

Malcar turned and raised her head, and saw an unfamiliar Hork-Bajir-Controller, wearing the tri-colored bands of a member of Sub-Visser One Hundred and Fifty-Three's personal guard, looming over the _illutilagh_ vat. Fighting down the instinctive surge of fear that nearly every Yeerk, at this period in history, felt in the presence of a Visserarchical envoy, she replied as calmly as possible, "Yes, that would be me."

The Hork-Bajir-Controller inclined his head. "My name is Lissim Seven-One-Three," he said. "I regret having to interfere with your Kalkat revels, but my duties require me to inform you that you are required to vacate your host and accompany me to the Sub-Visser's Bug fighter. If you refuse to do so, we will have no choice but to arraign you on charges of crimes against the Empire."

"Crimes?" Malcar repeated, trying to ignore the idiotic hammering of Teresa's heart. "What crimes?"

"Treason," said Lissim, "by sympathy with a host species."

* * *

**Author's Note: **Special thanks to AquaianGoddess for the title of this chapter. Her story "Project: PE01" was one of the first stories I read on this site, and, while I didn't much care for most of it, the phrase "Parasite Eve" has remained with me ever since. It was only a matter of time before it appeared in one of my own stories, albeit in a slightly altered form.


	13. Wheels within Wheels

When the world turns upside down on you, it can sometimes be hard to find an appropriate response. Malcar, on this occasion, did not even try: she merely gaped at the Sub-Visserial guardsman, as the Gauls might have gaped at St. Martin after the miracle of the pine tree, and it was left to Elskir to lodge a hesitant protest.

"Excuse me, Lissim Seven-One-Three," she said, "but I think you must have made a mistake."

"No mistake," said Lissim briefly. "My orders were quite clear: locate Malcar Seven-Four-Five, Controller of the human Teresa Sickles, and bring her to the Sub-Visser for loyalty examination."

"But, see here, Lissim Seven-One-Three," said Elskir, "if you knew Malcar... I mean, the things she's said about her host over the years..."

"I don't recall ever asserting that she was accused of sympathy with her own host," said Lissim.

"What, then?" said Elskir, with a strained attempt at a laugh. "You think she's a closet Taxxon-lover?"

"I neither know nor care in the slightest what she is," said Lissim. "The Sub-Visser did not confide his suspicions to me. He merely expressed his desire for an audience with her, and that audience I intend to provide." And he returned his gaze to Malcar, and fixed her with a stare that compelled obedience.

Malcar swallowed, and nodded. "All right," she said. "I'm ready."

"Good," said Lissim. "In here, please." And he withdrew from his belt a wide, long-necked bottle, the mouth of which was just wide enough for an average-sized Yeerk to slither through.

Malcar blinked. "What?"

"Did you suppose that the Sub-Visser would let you remain in your own host while you were questioned?" said Lissim. "Today, on Esiln Kalkat?" He jerked a clawed thumb toward the pool. "Even with all the immature Gedds being pressed into early use for the festival, there are still over five hundred hostless Yeerks in that pool. Five hundred Yeerks who are missing the only Esiln Kalkat revels that will occur in their lifetimes, simply because we lack sufficient hosts to accommodate them all. Can you explain to me why a suspected criminal should not be expected to forfeit her host body to one of them until her innocence can be satisfactorily demonstrated?"

Put that way, it did seem reasonable. It also eased Malcar's mind on one important point: if the Sub-Visser planned to interrogate her in her hostless state, he was presumably not planning on using the _gnielza_, or the _shrikiigi_, or any of the other preferred torture devices of the Visserarchy. All of those required a host body's sophisticated nervous system for the victim to properly appreciate the amount of pain that they inflicted.

"Very well," she said. "Make sure, though, that, once my host is free, she doesn't talk you out of letting your chosen _izcot_ (1) reinfest her. She can be quite insidiously persuasive when she wants to be."

"I thank you for the warning," said Lissim, in a voice that contained no hint of gratitude.

Suitably chastened, Malcar slid herself over and leaned Teresa's ear over the outstretched bottle. There was a brief _schluppp_ sound, and the next moment the puddle of sulp niar at the bottom of the bottle was occupied by the gray, limacine form of Malcar Seven-Four-Five.

* * *

As Teresa came out of the post-infestation paralysis and looked up at the massive Hork-Bajir form towering over her (so like, yet so different from, the Hork-Bajir-Controller to whom she had quoted the Athanasian Creed three days before), her mind was a mass of conflicting emotions. On the one hand, any respite from the soul-wearying overlordship of Malcar Seven-Four-Five was to her a cause for rejoicing, and it pleased her to think that some disadvantaged Yeerk's life might be brightened through her agency – but she was also confused (she understood the accusation of host sympathy even less than Malcar and Elskir did), apprehensive (did she really want a second strange person crawling through her mind?), and, foremost and most simply, afraid. A member of a host species can never be truly comfortable with the prospect of walking around a Yeerk pool uninfested; still less, that of being chaperoned on such a walk by an unfamiliar Hork-Bajir-Controller roughly twice her size.

The Hork-Bajir-Controller in question clicked his tongue. "_Gishimk-ith, n'kee_," he said. "_Aolua uie uyerioa_ the visual theater."

He was speaking the same linguistic bouillabaisse in which he had delivered the Sub-Visser's summons, but Teresa, unlike Malcar and Elskir, had never been a Hork-Bajir-Controller, and their creole was to her simply a mélange of meaningless words with an occasional English phrase thrown in. She gathered, however, that she was expected to accompany Lissim to the closed-off room at the far end of the pool, where the visual revel was being conducted. (She also gathered, from Lissim's tone, that "_n'kee_" was not a form of address that one used to one's social equals, but at that moment she was not in a position to take umbrage.)

She sent up a silent prayer for courage and clambered out of the vat of _illutilagh_, shivering as she did so at the coldness of the subterranean air against her wet skin. She wished that she could have gone back to the small room by the pool entrance where Malcar had left her clothes, so that she could have dried herself off and gotten dressed before going to be reinfested, but she knew better than to ask for that. Even a human-Controller would have been unlikely to grant such a request, and a Hork-Bajir-Controller, whose host had waterproof skin and no concept of clothing, would probably give her a low-powered Dracon beam in the leg for being so presumptuous as to make it.

It was, therefore, a wet, naked, shivering Teresa Sickles whom Lissim led by the shoulder to the visual theater. This, of course, only made her feel more vulnerable, although none of the human- or Hork-Bajir-Controllers they passed paid her the slightest heed. (Several Taxxons, however, did flick their tongues longingly in her direction, as though regretting that so tender and succulent a morsel should be set aside for other purposes. Teresa shuddered, and forced her thoughts in a more constructive direction.)

"Abba, Father, I put my life in Your hands," she whispered. (She had never much cared for David Haas's rendering of Psalm 30, but it seemed appropriate just then.) "In You, O Lord, I take refuge; let me never be put to shame. In Your justice rescue me, into Your hands I commend my..."

"_Gish'koth!_" Lissim barked suddenly.

Teresa blinked. "What?"

"Halt!"

Teresa looked up, and realized that they had reached the door of the visual theater. She must have closed her eyes without realizing it; if Lissim hadn't stopped her, she would have run right into the iron barrier, and probably broken her nose.

_And, Heaven knows, the Sub-Visser wouldn't want that,_ she thought, with a slight reassertion of her native refractoriness. _All the cattle must be kept in perfect health, so that the ranchers can properly exploit them. Even an _izcot_ has to have his well-tended pound of flesh to crawl around in._

She was just working herself up into a nice froth of righteous indignation when Lissim reached out and slid the door open, and a sudden, dazzling burst of green light blasted every coherent thought out of her mind. Because of their homeworld's unique nocturnal climate, the Yeerks had never invented fireworks (not that they could have shot off fireworks in the pool in any case); they had had to make do with relatively feeble phosphorescent displays, and, as a result, the tendency of their visual artists throughout history had been to focus on increasing the intensity of a display, without necessarily bothering about its objective beauty. After a few hundred generations of this, they had reached a point where any visual revel that didn't come within an ace of burning out a host's retinas was considered hopelessly inadequate for Kalkat purposes.

_Actually_ burning out a host's retinas, however, remained as inadvisable as ever, so Teresa's vision returned fairly quickly after the initial shock. She still couldn't see much in the darkened theater, of course, but she could make out the silhouettes of two Hork-Bajir-Controllers (one of whom, judging by his voice, was Lissim) crouching in a corner to her immediate left, whispering to each other in their interplanetary patois. What they were saying, she couldn't begin to guess, although the word "Sub-Visser" was repeated frequently, and at one point Lissim used a Galard phrase that she thought meant something like "You owe me big-time". This seemed to her an odd thing to say to someone you were just turning a host over to, but, before she could spend too much time pondering it, Lissim rose and strode out of the visual theater.

The other Hork-Bajir-Controller turned to her, and grinned. "So, Teresa Sickles," he whispered in English. "We meet again."

Teresa froze. Like most humans, she couldn't tell one Hork-Bajir from another merely by his profile, but she could distinguish their voices – and this particular voice had been burned into her memory over the course of the past week.

"Toloth?" she whispered.

* * *

(1) _Izcot_: Vaguely contemptuous Yeerkish word for a Yeerk too low-ranking to merit a host.


	14. Initiation

"Yes, Toloth," said the Hork-Bajir-Controller, amused at Teresa's astonishment. "You did not really believe, did you, that your Controller was a traitor to the Yeerk race? I simply decided that our little tri-daily talks ought not to be interrupted by so trivial a thing as Esiln Kalkat, so I looked into the Sulp Niar pool's infestation records, identified the lone Yeerk who Controlled a juvenile human named Teresa – an uncommon name among humans, I gather?"

Teresa shrugged. "There's a bunch of saints called Teresa," she said. "But I guess not many people name their kids after saints anymore."

"Ah," said Toloth. "In any case, once I knew that datum, the rest was fairly simple. Lissim Seven-One-Three and I have long been intimates; once he felt assured that I would repay him for the favor, he had no objection to tormenting an honest human-Controller with accusations of disloyalty. Indeed, I rather fancy that he was delighted by the prospect."

"But... what will you do when your boss finds out?" said Teresa.

"Deny everything," said Toloth, in a tone of complete indifference. "Who is the Sub-Visser more likely to believe: two of his most loyal guards, or some human-Controller who comes to him with a crazy story about being falsely arrested on Esiln Kalkat so that one of those guards could discuss philosophy with her host?"

Teresa thought about that. From a ruthless, amoral, Yeerk perspective, it made sense... except...

"Why are you doing this?" she said.

Toloth stiffened, as though he weren't used to being asked such impertinent questions by a mere vessel of infestation. "I wish to know all I can about the beliefs and attitudes of humans," he said. "It will be a help to me in my future career."

Teresa shook her head. "No," she said. "That's why I thought you were doing it until just now. But now you've gone through this elaborate, dangerous scheme just to make sure that our cycle of 'one talk every three days' isn't interrupted, when, if you wanted to talk to me, all you had to do was hang out by the pool on Tuesday until Malcar came in for her alternate feeding. That's what any sensible person would have done – unless, of course, he was taking orders from some very simple-minded person who couldn't grasp the concept of varying a schedule." She raised her head, and looked straight into the gleaming red eyes above her. "So what I think, Toloth, is that you're doing this because Gef wants you to."

* * *

Toloth's face remained impassive, but inwardly he winced. Perhaps he wasn't as safe as he had thought, if he could be seen through so easily. Or did the girl just have some uncanny ability to read people's hearts? She didn't seem like the type – but he was beginning to suspect that Teresa Sickles was many things she didn't seem.

"Very well," he said, with a great effort. "Suppose that to be so. What then?"

He expected Teresa to capitalize on her advantage and find out how Gef had gained such power over him, perhaps with a view to exerting a similar influence on her own Controller. Her next question, consequently, came as a complete surprise to him. "Why is Gef so interested in Christian theology?" she asked.

Toloth snorted, partly in relief and partly in derision. "Enigma only knows," he said. "If his thoughts are any indication, even he does not fully understand his fascination with you. All he knows is that you 'have knowledge of beginning things' – and, because of this, he is willing to follow you to the ends of the galaxy."

"Wait a minute," said Teresa, in an altered tone. "You mean that he believes what I've been telling you about Jesus?"

"So he says," said Toloth.

"In that case," said Teresa, "may I speak with him?"

This was much more the sort of thing Toloth had expected from her two exchanges ago; coming as it did now, however, it caught him completely off guard for the second time in less than a minute. "Why?"

"If he really believes in Jesus, there's something the two of us need to do together," said Teresa. "Usually a priest would do it with him, but in extraordinary circumstances any Christian can."

"I see," said Toloth. "And do you need me to leave Gef's body in order to do this, or will simply ceding control to him be enough?"

Teresa thought for a moment. "I don't see any reason why you'd need to leave his body," she said. "So long as he can respond when I ask him questions, that's all that really matters."

"You are most generous," said Toloth dryly.

"I try," said Teresa with a smile. "So is it a deal?"

Toloth had long since passed the point where he could have said "No". With a sigh, he disconnected his palps from the neurons controlling Gef's autonomous functions, and sank back into the darkness of the Hork-Bajir skull.

* * *

As Teresa watched Gef slowly reclaim the use of his body, it crossed her mind to wonder where she had gotten such unwonted boldness from. Only a week before, she would never have dreamed of asking a Yeerk warrior to step aside and let his host take over, no matter how important it might have been to the host's soul. (She wondered if this was how Peter had felt, when he had witnessed before the Sanhedrin.)

"Are you ready yet?" she said softly.

"Yes," murmured Gef, in a tone of wonder. "I am free."

"Good," said Teresa. "Now I'm going to make a series of statements, and you're going to tell me whether you believe them or not. All right?"

Gef nodded.

"Okay," said Teresa. "There is one God, who made the universe and everything in it: Mother Sky, Father Deep, and everything else, even the things that can't be seen or touched. He can do anything he wants, and His relation to you is that of a father to his child. Do you believe that?"

Gefs enormous head lowered and rose. "If Teresa say, Gef believe," he said.

Teresa frowned. "Gef, it's not what I say that's important," she said sternly. "It's what Jesus says. I could change my mind tomorrow and decide that the Yeerk sun-god was the real creator of the universe, but that wouldn't change what was true."

Gef seemed puzzled by her objection. "Gef believe Teresa now," he said, "not Teresa tomorrow."

There was a moment's silence (save for the hum of the phosphor-screen in the background) while the shrewdness of that simple statement penetrated Teresa's brain; then the young evangelist laughed. "Touché," she said. "Okay, then, so there's one God. And He has a son named Jesus, who is just as much God as God the Father is, and who helped Him to create everything." (She could almost hear the Nicene Fathers groaning in pain at that bowdlerization of their Creed, but she didn't think that the more theologically precise version would be any use to Gef.) "In order to heal the sickness of sin in us, He became a human and died by torture – but He came back to life again on the third day after his death, and went back to His Father about forty days after that. When the universe is finished, He'll come back a second time to reward or punish everyone who ever lived, and to be honored forever the way you would honor a seer. Do you believe all that?"

"Gef believe," said the Hork-Bajir.

"Okay. And there's a third Person, the Holy Spirit, who comes from the Father and Jesus and is God just like they are, and who made certain people in history able to see that Jesus would come someday. Do you believe that?"

"Gef believe."

"Okay. Now, when Jesus was living on Earth as a human, He gave some of His power to certain humans, and told them to tell as many people as they could about Him. Those humans, and the people they told – and the people _they_ told, and so on and so on – are all part of a huge, sacred family that can never be broken apart, and that anyone in the universe can join. Do you believe that?"

"This is what Teresa is part of?" said Gef.

Teresa nodded. "And what you'll be part of in a few minutes," she said. "But first you have to tell me that you believe in it."

The eight-foot catechumen smiled. "Gef believe."

"Okay. And do you believe that the process that makes you part of this family takes away all the bad things you've ever done, so that nothing stands between you and God anymore?"

"Gef believe."

"Do you believe that people who have died, if they are part of this family, can still know and love each other, as well as the people who are still living?"

"Gef believe."

"Do you believe that, when Jesus comes back at the end of time, everyone who ever died will come back to life again, and the universe itself will be made over again into something more wonderful than anyone can imagine?"

"Gef believe."

Teresa took a deep breath. "Okay," she said. "There's just one more thing. There is in this world a being of great cunning and malevolence, who, though you'll probably never be able to see him, will always be trying to get you to do evil and separate yourself from God. Do you..."

"Gef believe."

Teresa bit her lip to keep from laughing. "Okay, that's good," she said, "but it wasn't what I was about to ask. What I was going to say was, do you promise, when you realize that this being is making you want to do something, not to do it no matter how good it looks, or how dangerous it seems not to do it?"

Gef hesitated. "How Gef know when wanting come from evil one?"

"Usually, the thing you want to do will be something that God has said not to do," said Teresa. "Hating Yeerks, for instance. If you're not sure, you can..." She hesitated; ordinarily, she would have ended that sentence with "ask someone with more experience", but, in Gef's case, he wouldn't be in charge of his body most of the time, which would make seeking out spiritual counsel a difficult task.

"Ask Jesus?" Gef suggested.

For the second time during their conversation, Teresa was struck by the subtlety hidden inside that simple Hork-Bajir mind. "Yes," she said. "Ask Jesus. Can you do that?"

Gef nodded.

"All right, then," said Teresa. "Bend down."

Gef seemed surprised by this unexpected command, but obediently crouched down on his hands and knees with his head to the ground, looking something like a dragon dormant out of medieval heraldry. Teresa took her long, light-brown hair (still wet with the moisture of the _illutilagh_ bath) in her hands and held it out over Gef's head; she squeezed it gently, and little rivulets of water ran out of it and splattered over Gef's horns.

"Gef Makkil," Teresa whispered, "I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen."

She withdrew her hair and draped it back over her shoulder again, and Gef raised his head with wonder in his eyes. "Gef is saved now?" he said. "Gef is new creation?"

Teresa nodded, and nearly laughed aloud from sheer happiness. "Yes," she said. "Gef is new creation."


	15. The Crux of the Matter

Gef seemed mildly nonplussed by the simplicity of his rebirth. He looked down at his wrist-blades and began waving them back and forth, as though expecting the seal of God to appear on them. "Gef not feel different," he said.

"No, you won't," said Teresa. "At least not for a while. The baptism changed your soul, but it left your body the same as before – unless maybe it made it able to rise again, but that's not something that you can feel. Eventually, though, if you keep remembering that you have Jesus's life in you instead of your own, and do everything with that in mind, it'll be obvious that you've changed – not to you, maybe, but to other people."

"Even to Toloth Two-Nine-Four?" said Gef.

"Especially to him, I would think," said Teresa. "If the change is really permanent, it'll affect your thoughts more than anything else, and Toloth ought to catch on to that pretty quickly. And speaking of Toloth, you should probably let him know that we're done out here, so he can... you know..."

She trailed off, unwilling to actually say what she knew Gef had to do. Gef, however, surprised her by nodding and saying it himself. "Yes," he said. "Gef must be host to Toloth now, so Teresa can teach Toloth about Jesus."

"Exactly," said Teresa. "Do you think you can do that?"

"He already has," said Gef's voice, and Teresa jumped slightly. After three years as a host, she still hadn't gotten used to the way Yeerks could reclaim a host's body without apparent effort.

"Um... hello, Toloth," she said.

* * *

"Hello, Teresa," said Toloth, with mocking courtesy in his tone. "So you have made my host fit for your god, have you?"

"That was the idea," said Teresa.

"Odd that you should feel the need to bother," said Toloth. "I somehow doubt that a Hork-Bajir could contribute much to this elegant philosophical edifice of yours."

"It's not really about that," said Teresa. "The philosophy's important, but it's secondary. What we're really about is making sure that people go to Heaven."

Toloth cocked his head. "To other worlds, you mean?" It was a natural enough motivation for a primitive religion, but it seemed out of character for this one – and, besides, if a large number of humans had a religious impulse to go to other planets, surely the Empire could make a Taxxon-style deal with them instead of bothering with surreptitious conquest.

Teresa shook her head. "Not in the sense that you mean, no," she said. "When a Christian uses it, 'Heaven' doesn't mean the sky; it means the place beyond space and time, where the righteous go when they die to be with Jesus forever."

"Ah," said Toloth, a touch of condescension creeping into his voice. "Like the gardens of Mother Sky, where venerable Hork-Bajir feast on the sweet bark of the sun and moon."

Teresa shrugged. "If you like, yeah."

"I see," said Toloth. "And what must one do to attain this privileged realm?"

"Well, it's not really a question of what _we_ do," said Teresa. "Left to our own devices, we can't get within shouting distance of Heaven. That's why Jesus had to die."

Toloth blinked. "Had to what?"

"Die," said Teresa. "Weren't you listening when I told Gef about that?"

Toloth frowned, and examined Gef's recent memories. Yes, the girl had made some reference to Jesus's death by torture, but it had been too brief to make a real impression on him. He said as much, and Teresa let out a self-chastising laugh. "Shows you what kind of apologist I am," she said. "The most important article in the Creed, and I just skim right over it."

"Well, then," said Toloth, "perhaps you would care to elaborate on it now?"

"I suppose I ought to," said Teresa. "You remember how I said that Jesus entered into the womb of a girl named Mary and became a human?"

"I do."

"Well, when He grew up, He gathered a bunch of disciples together and began teaching people about God: what He was, what He did, what He wanted them to be, that sort of thing. But he also talked about Himself: how He was God, and how all the prophets had known about Him, and how you had to participate in His life if you wanted to have any credit with God. That didn't make the ordinary religious leaders very happy – especially when He started talking about how pathetically corrupt those religious leaders were, with their tricky ways of distorting God's law to circumvent the demands of justice. So they paid one of his disciples to betray him, trumped up a pseudo-trial, and persuaded the local representative of the empire that ruled them to have Him executed by slow strangulation."

Toloth nodded judiciously, as though this were the best that could be expected under the circumstances. "Yes, I see," he said. "But, being a god, of course he returned to life eventually?"

"Two days later," said Teresa. "A couple women coming to tend to the body were the first to see Him, but, by the time He went back to Heaven about a month later, there were a couple hundred people who had."

"Ah," said Toloth. "Well, it is a pleasant enough story, but I don't quite see why you should consider it unusually important. Surely you have tales of Jesus doing many other equally striking things..."

"Oh, sure, He performed a bunch of other miracles," said Teresa. "Still does, for that matter. But the Resurrection was the important one, because that was the reason He came to Earth in the first place."

Toloth cocked his head. "So he could die?"

"So he could save us from our sins," said Teresa. "Remember what I said three days ago? Sin brings death; you can't get around that. If a _sel_-whatever-that-word-was... a person who dominates his planet..."

"_Sellith_," said Toloth.

"Right, that. If a _sellith_ is sinful, he has to die. But if the _sellith_ is also God, then He's stronger than sin or death: He can take not just one person's sin, but the sins of everyone in the universe, and bury them in His own grave, then come back out of that grave and start living all over again. And that's what Jesus did."

It was a poor explanation, she knew. If she had been St. Paul or somebody, she could have done infinitely better. But, however inadequate it was, it seemed to have conveyed the appropriate ideas to Toloth, who leaned back on his haunches and made a thoughtful-sounding rumbling noise deep in his chest cavity. "So the ritual that you performed with my host just now," he said, "would be a way of letting him participate in this death of Jesus's, so that he can 'start living all over again' himself?"

"That's the basic idea," Teresa confirmed.

"I see," said Toloth. "Well, I shall have to remember all this. Perhaps someday, if I ever get tired of my own life, I can come have you pour water over me and start a new one."

He was being flippant, Teresa knew, but she felt a shiver run down her spine anyway. For all her joy at Gef's conversion, she still wasn't used to the notion of baptizing aliens, and the suggestion that a Yeerk, of all beings, might someday come asking her for the water of salvation was both thrilling and disturbing at the same time. Of course, it would never really happen, but still...

"Yeah," she said with a slight smile. "Yeah, maybe you can."


	16. A Corporal Work of Mercy

Toloth, at this point, glanced up at the blazing phosphor-screen and frowned. "Beams of Kandrona, have we been here that long?" he muttered. (Teresa had no idea how he could tell time from the visual revel – unless maybe this was some famous composition that he had seen a hundred times, and knew the exact intervals between any two bits of it.) "I will be missed fairly soon if I don't get moving."

"So you're going to return me to Malcar now?" said Teresa, trying to keep her voice free of any note of disappointment. After all, she had known it was going to happen eventually, and if Gef could have a good attitude about being re-Controlled, surely she ought to be able to do the same.

"It would seem so," said Toloth. "Unless there is something else you feel it important to tell me about your religion."

Teresa shook her head. "No, that's probably enough for one day," she said. "I suppose you can..." Then a thought struck her. "Oh, wait a minute!"

"Yes?" said Toloth.

"What about the other Yeerk?"

Toloth blinked. "What other Yeerk?"

"The one in the pool," said Teresa. "The one who didn't have a host body, and was going to infest me so he didn't miss Esiln Kalkat."

Toloth stared at her. "Teresa Sickles," he said, "do you not understand the concept of a ruse? Nothing Lissim told your Controller was true. You were not brought here to play host to an _izcot_; you were brought here to appease Gef, so that he didn't get himself killed trying to meet with you."

"Yes, I know that," said Teresa impatiently. "But that doesn't mean the other is a bad idea, does it? I mean, he was right about there being a whole bunch of Yeerks still in the pool who are missing this big, important, once-in-a-lifetime holiday; if I'm not being used by anybody at the moment, don't I sort of have an obligation to help one of them out?"

Slowly, Toloth wrapped his mind around this idea. "Do you mean to say," he said, "that you are _volunteering_ to let yourself be infested, solely to gratify someone about whom you know nothing save that it is a member of the race attempting to subjugate your planet?"

"Basically, yeah," said Teresa.

Christian charity can be an unsettling thing to one unused to it. For a moment, Toloth couldn't quite bring himself to believe that Teresa actually meant what she was saying – just as, perhaps, the Lagerführer of Auschwitz felt when confronted with Maximilian Kolbe.

Next moment, however, he rallied. Why, he asked himself reasonably, should he continue to let anything that Teresa Sickles did surprise him? The trick to handling this creature was to recognize that she might do absolutely anything, and roll with the punches wherever possible – and he certainly couldn't think of any reason why he ought not to let her be randomly infested, if she wished it. True, her Controller probably wouldn't approve (most Controllers didn't like the notion of other Yeerks infesting their hosts, since there were so many things one's host knew that one didn't want becoming public knowledge), but, as he had said to Teresa earlier, he cared not a straw for anything Malcar Seven-Four-Five might do to him.

"Very well," he said. "But you must be quick about it: five minutes, no more."

He rose and strode from the visual theater, and returned in a minute or two with a bowl from the pool kitchens, in which a smallish Yeerk was swimming about frantically in a small puddle of sulp niar.

"Stupid thing," he muttered. "Can't it tell when a person is trying to do it a favor?" Brusquely, he grabbed his co-racialist with one hand, held Teresa's head still with the other, and smashed the hostless Yeerk against her left ear.

* * *

The sensation of being infested by a Yeerk is never a pleasant one, even when it is done, as it ought to be, with the head immersed in sulp niar so that the infesting Yeerk can swim in freely. When the Yeerk is being squashed against the side of your head by a member of the Imperial military, and is wriggling its palps across your temple in a frantic effort to find your auditory canal before it dies of desiccation, the process is that much less comfortable. Teresa felt her stomach beginning to lurch, and she clapped her right hand over her mouth before she could embarrass herself all over Toloth's feet.

It seemed an interminable length of time (though it was really only about twenty seconds) before the Yeerk managed to locate her ear, and she felt the familiar stiffness of the infestation paralysis as it slithered into her brain. She waited until it had plugged itself into her cerebral cortex, and then thought, «Hello.»

She could feel the Yeerk start: evidently it hadn't expected to be addressed in this way. «Um... hello,» it said. «Are you my new host?»

«Well, not really,» said Teresa. «I'm already taken, unfortunately. But my Controller's busy right now, so we decided to let you have a spin. It's all there in my memories, if you want to check.»

«Oh,» the Yeerk murmured, dazed. «Okay, then.»

«I'm Teresa, by the way,» Teresa added – superfluously, of course, since this was also in her memories, but it seemed the polite thing to do.

«Oliss,» said the Yeerk. «Oliss Three-Eight-Three.»

«_Mucho gusto,_» said Teresa amiably, using one of two phrases she remembered from her fifth-grade Spanish class.

Oliss didn't bother to respond with the other. It (since Yeerks derive their gender identities from their hosts, a hostless Yeerk cannot properly be called "he" or "she") had accessed Teresa's memories, and was now staring dumbstruck at the series of events that had led to its being permitted to join in the Esiln Kalkat revels. It saw Teresa's first, impulsive word to Gef those two weeks before; it saw the three discussions with Toloth that had resulted therefrom; it saw Toloth and Lissim's elaborate scheme to arrange a fourth discussion; and, most astonishing of all, it saw Teresa's request to be given to it so that it might know, however briefly, the glories of Esiln Kalkat.

It also – not incidentally – saw all of Teresa's earlier life history: how she had been lured into the Yeerk pool by a Sharing official who had addressed her church's youth group, how she had passed through two Controllers' hands (so to speak) before being given officially to Malcar Seven-Four-Five, and all the petty cruelties that had made up her life ever since. It was not merely Teresa's uncomplaining submissiveness that impressed Oliss (though of course Oliss, like any Yeerk, could well admire stoic fortitude when it saw it); what amazed it was the notion that this human, who had been so badly hurt by the Yeerk race, still found it possible – indeed, necessary – to be kind to Yeerks when she could.

It was still trying to assimilate this thought when it felt Toloth nudge Teresa's – its – arm. "Well, _shapluk _(2)," he said, "do you intend to spend your few minutes of Kalkat staring at a darkened floor?"

Oliss roused itself. Yes, that was right, it had a revel to partake of. It could worry about Teresa Sickles's uncanny selflessness when it was back in the pool.

Slowly, hesitantly, it raised Teresa's head and turned her eyes toward the phosphor-screen – and then its breath caught in Teresa's throat.

Nor was this surprising. Teresa's surmise earlier had been correct: the visual revel at the Sulp Niar pool that day was indeed a classic of Yeerk phosphoric art. It was, in fact, Kakkana One-Five-Three's _Vanarx Tulest_ ("Flouter of Yeerkbanes"), composed in the early-cycle of Generation 79 to commemorate the demise of the great vanarx hunter Jagag Three-Prime. Sub-Visser One Hundred and Fifty-Three had selected this magnificent panegyric partly so that its air of proud defiance, as well as its celebration of Yeerk valor and cunning, might serve as a warning to any Andalite bandits who might be prowling around, but also because, being so ancient a piece, it belonged to an era when beauty still mattered on the phosphor-screen. (For Sub-Visser One Hundred and Fifty-Three, as the reader may have surmised from his concern for the _illutilagh_ three days before, fancied himself something of an Arbiter of Elegance as well as a great statesman – though, in point of fact, he was not tremendously gifted in either role.) Its finale, in particular – that stunning cascade of violet, green, and crimson – is one of the finest moments in Yeerk art, prompting one human critic to observe that "you walk away from _Vanarx Tulest_ blinded with tears, whereas you walk away from most other Yeerk phosphor-shows simply blind".

It was this finale that Oliss now beheld – though, of course, it was not the same finale of _Vanarx Tulest_ that an expert in phosphoric art would have seen. Oliss knew nothing of the deeper significance, the somber sense of loss intertwined with a consciousness of ultimate victory, that so delighted the sympathetic aesthete. All it saw was a phantasmagoria of stunningly vivid colors fluctuating across a screen in highly complex geometric patterns – but, to a being who had never seen anything at all before except the inside of the Yeerk pool's host-training room (and that for only a few minutes, and with Gedd eyes), that was enough. Oliss had never suspected that the universe contained such beauty, and for nearly five minutes it sat motionless, gazing on the phosphor-screen with insatiable awe.

It might have stared (if the program had lasted so long) for five hours more, if it hadn't received a sharp poke in Teresa's ribs. "All right, _shapluk_, that's enough," said Toloth. "The revel will be over in a few minutes, and we don't want anyone asking awkward questions." And he held the bowl underneath Teresa's ear.

Oliss flirted with the notion of ignoring him, but then realized that it didn't know whether it would be implicated should Toloth's impropriety come to light. All things considered, perhaps it was better off following his instructions.

With a sigh, it released Teresa's neurons and slipped out of her mind – but, before it did so, it sent one last message to her. It was aware that saying anything of the sort to a host made it a bad Yeerk, but it would have felt worse if it had let it go unsaid.

«Thank you.»

«You're welcome.»

* * *

(2) A Yeerkish form of address to a social inferior, roughly equivalent to the English "sirrah".


	17. Quick and Powerful

As Toloth and Teresa slipped out of the visual theater amid the crowd of departing revelers, Toloth caught sight of Lissim Seven-One-Three standing beside one of the empty cages, munching on a chunk of pine bark thickly coated with resin and spices. With remarkable deftness for a being so large and blade-covered, he extricated himself and Teresa from the crowd and went over to his comrade-in-arms.

Lissim glanced up as the two of them approached. "Is it time, Toloth?" he said.

"It is," said Toloth. "You have the human's Controller?"

For answer, Lissim reached a hand into the cage and pulled out the flask containing Malcar Seven-Four-Five. "I didn't think it was a good idea to be carrying it around," he said. "Someone might start asking awkward questions."

Toloth nodded his approval. "Return her," he said.

Lissim took Teresa's head in his hands (his touch was gentler than Toloth's had been, and subtly more impersonal) and pressed the mouth of the flask to her ear. Malcar squirmed forward, squeezing herself through the flask's narrow neck, and for the second time in less than fifteen minutes Teresa felt the touch of a Yeerk's palps against her ear. From the standpoint of physical comfort, it was a drastic improvement on her last infestation, but Oliss Three-Eight-Three had made almost as deep an impression on Teresa as Teresa had made on Oliss: she remembered the touch of that diffident, innocent, almost humble mind, and she realized that she couldn't bear returning to Malcar Seven-Four-Five's control after that.

"No," she cried. "No, wait... Toloth, please..."

Then the infestation paralysis set in, and she said no more.

* * *

Malcar Seven-Four-Five was fit to be tied. For nearly an hour, as Esiln Kalkat had raged about her, she had sat in Lissim's flask, waiting to be interrogated. At first she had been terrified, but, as time went by and nothing happened except the occasional shifting of the flask (and even that had ceased after fifteen minutes or so), her fear had given way to annoyance. What was the Sub-Visser waiting for? If he wanted to find out where she had been on the morning of the 14th, why didn't he plug her into the _shirak_-board and get it over with? And if not, why didn't he put her back in Teresa and let her get on with her one day of sensory abandon?

Then, just as her ire had reached boiling point, she felt the flask rise into the air and tilt forward, and her olfactory palps picked up the unmistakable scent of her host. Without a second's hesitation, she slithered toward Teresa's ear, anxious to have a mouth again so she could start chewing somebody out.

When she plugged herself into Teresa's brain, however, she was caught off guard by the sudden influx of grief that hit her. She was accustomed to a fairly broad range of emotions from Teresa during reinfestation – tension, surliness, obnoxiously serene acceptance – but she wasn't used to having her blubber like the Madonna of Syracuse. If Malcar hadn't known better, she would have thought her host had just lost her best friend.

«Oh, for pity's sake, Tessie, stop bawling,» she snapped, using Teresa's hated childhood nickname in hopes that this would irritate her into silence. «I don't know what they've been doing to you, but it can't be that bad.»

But this only seemed to make matters worse. Her host seemed to be caught in a vicious cycle: the very act of trying to pull herself together made her think of what Malcar would do if she didn't, which seemed to be the trigger for another attack of uncontrollable mental sobs. Malcar, bewildered, decided that the safest thing to do was just tune her out and focus on the routine tasks of regaining muscular control and checking recent memories.

It was this latter, of course, that proved to be the shocker. Malcar, despite her very real fears that the rise of Christianity would mean the downfall of the Yeerk Empire, had managed, over the course of the past couple weeks, to convince herself that Toloth Two-Nine-Four's regular interrogations of her host on the subject were of no particular importance. In part, this was simply because she didn't want to seek an audience with the Sub-Visser unless she absolutely had to (which, given the nature of the Visserarchy at this time, was only sensible), but there was also a stubborn streak of Yeerk parochialism in her, which made it all but impossible for her to believe that so anthropocentric a religion as Christianity could ever make serious inroads among the various races of the Imperial dominion. Now, however, as she scanned Teresa's perceptions of the past hour, she concluded with horror that she had been far too sanguine.

She saw Toloth's admission of subservience to his host's desires, and that appalled her. She saw Oliss's fascinated wonder at Teresa's sense of charity, and that unnerved her. But what truly terrified her was the simplest image of all: Gef Makkil crouching on the floor of the visual theater like a dragon dormant, and Teresa holding her hair over him and squeezing out its moisture onto his head. She knew what that meant; she knew what it could do if left unchecked.

She raised her head and stared into her abductor's Hork-Bajir eyes. "What have you done, Toloth Two-Nine-Four?" she whispered.

* * *

Toloth, secure in his certainty that the eighth-century peon before him could do him no harm, permitted himself a smirk. "You have, I think, full access to your host's recent memories, Malcar Seven-Four-Five," he said. "In which case, you know quite well what I have done."

"Yes," said Malcar in a strange tone. "But do _you_ know what you have done, Toloth Two-Nine-Four?"

Toloth frowned, but did not reply.

"I will tell you what you have done," Malcar continued. "You have permitted my host to make that Hork-Bajir you wear an initiate in the mysteries of her religion. Which is to say, you have unleashed an ideological pestilence that may well corrupt the very heart of the Empire before it runs its course."

At this, Toloth laughed aloud. "My dear base-born pool-mate," he said, "I think you have been infesting Teresa Sickles longer than is good for you. I know that some Andalite thinkers like to discuss the prevalence of certain ideas on the model of the spread of pathogens, but I had thought that the Yeerk intellect was beyond such tedious fallacies."

"Oh?" said Malcar. "You think the comparison fallacious, do you?"

"Self-evidently so," said Toloth. "Disease germs proliferate through cellular reproduction, and they infect an organism by feeding on it in some fashion. In other words, their potency is due to the fact that they are living things. Now, an idea may be a powerful thing, but it is not living."

Malcar stared darkly at him for a long moment; then she said, softly, "This one is."

Toloth glanced at Lissim, and the two soldiers burst into loud guffaws, startling a passing Gedd-Controller. Despite their confidence in their influence with the Sub-Visser, both of them had had a lingering suspicion that Malcar Seven-Four-Five might prove a more formidable adversary than they had counted upon. To find that she was clearly mad was not only a marvelous joke, but a great relief as well.

"Laugh if you will, Toloth Two-Nine-Four," said Malcar, raising her voice, "but I have Controlled this host for three years, and I have seen and heard things that would make Visser Three himself fear this thing the humans call Christianity. It is a subtle, sinister poison; it paints itself as mild, innocent, even friendly to one's own aims, until a person welcomes it into his mind – and then it changes him so dramatically that his own spawn-mates would not know him.

"It has toppled empires before now. When the current Visser One first arrived on this planet, there was a state called the Soviet Union that controlled more territory than any other on Earth. For nearly three-quarters of a century it had been one of the most feared and respected players in the human game of nations, swallowing dozens of other states and turning dozens more into tools to do its will – and yet, when Edriss Five-Six-Two arrived, it was in its death throes. And would you like to know why, Toloth Two-Nine-Four? Would you like to know what the spirit was that made the subject peoples of the Soviet Union itch to topple their masters, and that all the forces of that globe-bestriding power could not ultimately keep at bay? I will tell you. It was the same spirit that you have let Teresa instill in your host.

"Nor was this an isolated incident. The whole history of the Christian Church is studded with similar events: with friends of kings who, upon being entrusted with authority in the Church, have turned into their enemies; with emperors who have repented of their statecraft when threatened with endless perdition; with girls little older than Teresa who have turned the tides of wars, believing themselves to be acting on messages from angels. Mere theories, however elegant or compelling they may be, do not inspire this kind of behavior.

"Yes, Toloth Two-Nine-Four, Christianity is a living thing."

Toloth waved a hand and nodded indulgently. "Yes, yes, of course, Malcar Seven-Four-Five," he said. "But, all the same, I think it unlikely that Gef Makkil will be able to duplicate those extraordinary feats you describe." And he turned and walked away without waiting for a reply, and Lissim, after a moment's hesitation, followed behind him.

Malcar stared after their retreating tails. "I hope not, Toloth Two-Nine-Four," she whispered. "For the sake of the Empire, I hope not."


	18. Three Types of Unbelief

"Tell me, Toloth Two-Nine-Four," said Lissim as the two guards made their way back to the Sub-Visser's private reveling area, "just what is this human idea that Malcar Seven-Four-Five believes to be so dangerously vital?"

Toloth turned and looked sharply at his colleague, all his wits suddenly awake. Was Lissim attempting to locate a weakness in him, with an eye toward eliminating an inconveniently ambitious fellow-guardsman? But Lissim's expression betrayed only mild inquisitiveness, and Toloth decided it would be best to answer the question with a minimum of fuss – and, of course, without revealing the slightest interest of his own.

"Oh, you know," he said, waving a vague claw. "One of those curious mythical systems that host species are so prone to develop. As near as I can make out, it asserts that the Maker of the Universe became a human some two thousand Earthly years ago, got himself killed by his fellow humans, and then came back to life again. Apparently this is supposed to give the humans who believe in him some special form of life themselves."

Lissim blinked, absorbing this. "What a strange idea," he said. "Is this god-human supposed to be still walking around Earth somewhere, then?"

Toloth shrugged. "Malcar's host did not discuss what happened to him after his revival," he said. "Perhaps he returned to the place beyond space and time where she says he lives – that 'Heaven' that is not the sky."

Lissim shook his head. "Humans," he said. "Mad, the lot of them. Just like their Controllers."

Toloth nodded. "Doubtless it is due to the intensity of human sense perceptions," he said. "They cannot properly sort through the cascades of phenomena that assail them; consequently their outlook becomes warped, and they begin to develop the most extraordinary notions."

"I dare say," said Lissim.

They then turned the conversation to other subjects, and, by the time they reunited with the Sub-Visser and their fellow guards, they had put Jesus and Malcar Seven-Four-Five entirely out of their minds.

* * *

Elskir Five-Nought-Seven had just gotten out of the _illutilagh_ bath, and was drying herself off in the pool antechamber when Malcar came in, wearing a truly extraordinary expression on Teresa's face. It wasn't at all the way Elskir would have imagined someone looking who had just been interrogated by Sub-Visser One Hundred and Fifty-Three; it was more like the expression of someone who had just been informed that the Yeerk race would be exterminated in twenty-seven hours unless she could retrieve the Mystic Pearls of Thrishalaak from the bottom of the Uret Sea.

Elskir coughed uncertainly. "Er... welcome back, Malcar Seven-Four-Five," she said. "So the Sub-Visser let you off, did he?"

"Not precisely," said Malcar.

Elskir waited for some amplification of this remark, but for a while Malcar seemed ill-disposed to say anything more. It wasn't until she had dried herself off, put on Teresa's clothes, and spent a minute or so staring intensely at the antechamber wall, that she turned abruptly to her companion and said, "Tell me, Elskir Five-Oh-Seven, what do you know about Christianity?"

Elskir blinked. "Um not much, really," she said. "Kati hasn't been in a church since –" (she did a quick check of her host's memories) "– her aunt's wedding in 1994."

«Poor thing,» said Teresa inside Malcar's mind.

Malcar ignored her. "Well, permit me to inform you," she said, "that it is a pernicious and repellent system, totally opposed to any reasonable notion of a powerful and dynamic society – and that Teresa is trying to persuade a member of the Sub-Visser's guard to subscribe to it."

Elskir stared for a moment, then laughed aloud. "You mean _that's_ what all that rubbish about treason by sympathy with a host species was about?" she said. "The old Ishlok-of-the-Hills routine? (3) Oh, that's priceless."

"No, it isn't," said Malcar, nettled. "It's appalling. If he's going to these lengths just to get me out of Teresa's body, things have already progressed well beyond the danger point. She's already snared his host; it's only a matter of time before she gets the Yeerk himself."

"Well, and what if he does?" said Elskir. "If the Sub-Visser's man-at-arms thinks it would be fun to say a rosary once in a while, why not let him? It's not as though he'd be the first crackpot our race has ever..." She saw the expression in Malcar's eyes, and trailed off. "Well, maybe not."

"Thank you," said Malcar.

"So what are you going to do?" said Elskir. "Malthalamize(4) her until she agrees not to talk to this guy anymore?"

Malcar shook her head with a sigh. "No, that wouldn't work," she said. "You don't know these Christians. Pain – their own pain, I mean – just encourages them. They thank their God for allowing them to suffer persecution for the sake of the Name, and then they keep on doing what they were doing, only that much more enthusiastically."

"Oh," said Elskir. "So the only way to stop them is to convince them that God doesn't want them doing whatever it is."

Malcar looked up sharply at her. "Do you know, Elskir, that's not a bad idea," she said. "I wonder..."

She pondered for a moment, then said, abruptly, "Thanks, Elskir. I won't forget this," and strode out of the antechamber, leaving Elskir to wonder what sort of scheme she had just inspired.

* * *

The Yeerk pool was alive with the clicks and whistles of Yeerk speech when Oliss Three-Eight-Three was slipped back into it. To an alien, this might seem unusual, given that (_a_) most Yeerks do very little talking while in the pool, and (_b_) this being Esiln Kalkat, the pool was practically empty anyway. But, in fact, the two factors cancel each other out: the folkway against pool-time conversation is one imposed by hosted Yeerks, and, on the rare occasions when there are hardly any of these in the pool, the hostless ones tend to be veritable fountains of garrulity.

Furthermore, the fact of one of their number having been suddenly picked up and carried away by an unknown Hork-Bajir-Controller (which several of them had witnessed via echolocation) had given them an all-but-inexhaustible topic for excited speculation. Who was the Hork-Bajir-Controller? Why had he (or she) taken Oliss? Was there some sort of ritual performed on Esiln Kalkat that required the sacrifice of a hostless Yeerk to the Kandrona? Due to their natural lack of data, the pool-dwellers could answer none of these questions – which, of course (since Yeerks are, in many respects, only human), only made them speculate the more feverishly. By the time Oliss returned, the pool was fairly humming with theories, each wilder than the last; the poor creature was practically mobbed by its fellow _izcots_ as they each sought confirmation of their favorite notions.

*Are you well, Oliss Three-Eight-Three?* clicked one. *The Sub-Visser didn't torture you too mercilessly, did he?*

*Why should the Sub-Visser torture his own spy?* inquired another tartly. *Do be reasonable, Zisha Nine-Six-Five.*

*What is your connection to Visser One, Oliss Three-Eight-Three?*

*How did you get trapped in morph?*

*Why...*

*Enough!* said a new voice from Oliss's right – a voice so forceful it sent two or three Yeerks reeling backward with the force of its vibrations. Oliss turned its palps and perceived its friend Pafil Twelve-Three-Six. *Can you not let your pool-mate reacclimate itself to its surroundings? Be still, and leave Oliss Three-Eight-Three to steal a few moments' peace and quiet; you shall have all your answers presently.*

The others murmured, but reluctantly swam away, one by one, until Oliss and Pafil were left alone in their corner of the pool.

*Thank you, Pafil Twelve-Three-Six,* said Oliss.

*Not at all,* said Pafil.

Then it hesitated. *Though, to be perfectly honest, part of my motivation was to get you alone so you could tell the story to me first. Not,* it added hastily, *that I wasn't concerned for you, as well. In fact, part of my thought was that, if it were the sort of story that is difficult to tell, you could tell it just to me, and then I could tell it to the others... you see?*

Oliss smiled inwardly. *Yes, Pafil Twelve-Three-Six,* it said. *I see quite well.*

There was a pause.

*Well?* said Pafil. *Is it such a story?*

Oliss let out the high-pitched whistle that serves Yeerks in their native state for a sigh. *It is difficult to tell, yes,* it said. *But not because it is painful. It is not in the least painful –* (here its tone became almost wistful) *– but it is... strange. Very, very strange.*

It paused briefly to arrange its thoughts, and Pafil waited expectantly.

*Tell me, Pafil Twelve-Three-Six,* said Oliss after some moments had passed, *if you were a human, what would you think of the Yeerk race?*

Pafil was caught off guard. This was not the sort of question a Yeerk, even a hostless Yeerk, asked another; it was too easy to slide into treason in one's answer. Indeed, the very act of asking the question suggested, if not actual treason, a certain weakness in one's loyalty to the Empire. Unless, of course, some of the others were correct in their speculations, and Oliss was indeed a spy for the Sub-Visser – in which case Pafil's life might well depend on its answer.

It chose its words carefully. *I suppose that I would feel as the conquered always feels toward the conqueror.*

*Exactly,* said Oliss, apparently oblivious to its companion's judicious phrasing. *You would not think kindly of us, would you? You would view us as monsters from outer space come to steal your people's bodies. You would not continually remind yourself that we had hearts and souls just as you did, and you certainly would not go out of your way to be kind to us.*

Pafil considered this. *No,* it said, having decided that agreement was safe so far. *No, I do not think I would do that.*

*And if you did,* Oliss continued, *would that not prove that there was something exceptional about you – some force inside you that was stronger than ordinary nature?*

*Yes, I suppose it would,* said Pafil. *But what does all this have to do with your adventure outside the pool just now?*

Oliss raised its palps toward the top of the pool, and absorbed a few extra Kandrona particles to fortify itself. *Let me tell you, Pafil Twelve-Three-Six,* it said, *about the human called Teresa Sickles.*

* * *

(3) A reference to Ishlok One-Eight-Two, a legendary outlaw of Generation 59, one of whose most famous exploits involved him switching host bodies with his sworn enemy Council Member Eleven, so that the latter might be captured and killed by his own soldiers. His name has thus become a proverb for deflecting one's own guilt onto one's accuser, or (in general) onto anyone who could not possibly deserve it.

(4) This is an Anglicization of the Yeerkish word _shrutellipiv_, which means "to stimulate the pain centers of a host's brain for disciplinary purposes".


	19. The Tempting of Teresa Sickles

"Teresa?" Catherine Sickles called up the stairs. "Your father and I are heading out to get decorations for the Christmas cookies tomorrow. We'll be back in a few minutes."

"Okay, Mom, bye," Malcar called back. "See you later."

The front door slammed shut, and Malcar tossed aside the Baby-Sitters Club book she had been pretending to read in case someone came in. «Honestly, Teresa,» she said, «couldn't you have found something mildly interesting to stock your library with? Between your puerile devotionals and your pathetic teenage-girl fluff, it's amazing I can still think at all.»

This comment, like every other comment that Malcar had directed at her host since sunrise that morning, glanced off Teresa's psyche without leaving a scratch. «Interesting that your big holiday and ours were so close together this year,» she commented.

Malcar didn't reply. She supposed there would come a time, eventually, when she could think about Esiln Kalkat without flinching, but that time certainly had not come yet.

«They're even kind of the same sort of holiday, when you think about it,» Teresa said. «The Feast of Someone Getting a Body. Kind of appropriate that Gef should have been baptized when he was.»

This was the first time she had directly referred to her accomplishment of the previous day, and Malcar seized her opportunity. «I wanted to talk to you about that, Teresa,» she said. «Are you sure you did the right thing, baptizing that Hork-Bajir? yesterday?»

Her host's synapses instantly formed themselves into a pattern of extreme wariness. «What do you mean?» said Teresa.

«Well, I'm not a theologian, of course,» said Malcar, «but wasn't the point of the Incarnation, on your theory, to undo the effects of the sin of Adam?»

«Yes...» said Teresa cautiously.

«Well, then, what makes you think it did anything for someone like Gef? He's not connected to Adam the way you are, is he?»

«Hang on a second,» said Teresa. «You're not trying to say that Hork-Bajir are sinless, are you? Because Gef himself said...»

«No, no,» said Malcar impatiently. «I'm saying that they inherited original sin from a different source than you did, so maybe they weren't – what's the word – redeemed the same way you were. Maybe God has a completely different plan for them, and you're interfering with it by forcing Gef into your own mode of salvation.»

_Bull's-eye,_ she thought with satisfaction, seeing the distress and uncertainty her words produced in Teresa's mind. _How do you deal with someone who just wants to serve her God? By convincing her that she's letting God down. Elskir's a genius._

But then, before she could pat herself on the back and turn her attention to something else, Teresa, who had been praying fervently for guidance while Malcar was gloating to herself, said, «But that can't be right. St. Paul says that Christ died once for all. Doesn't "all" include Hork-Bajir?»

Malcar was momentarily nonplussed, but she rallied quickly. «I thought that just meant "all men",» she said. «After all, it doesn't include angels, does it?»

«Okay, fine,» said Teresa, «but what's a "man"?»

«Excuse me?»

«What does the word "man" mean in this context?» said Teresa. «A rational animal, right? As opposed to angels, which are pure spirits. Well, Hork-Bajir are rational, and they're animals. That means they're covered.»

«Well, I'll grant you that Hork-Bajir are animals,» Malcar muttered, «but I'm not sure about the other half of that... But then what becomes of the idea that Jesus had to be a part of Adam's race in order to redeem it? I'm pretty sure I remember Father Gullickson telling you about that, once.» And she activated the necessary memory synapses to flood Teresa's consciousness with the old priest's exposition of _Cur Deus Homo_.

Teresa sighed. «Yeah, I know,» she said. «And Anselm's a great saint and a Doctor of the Church, and I don't like to argue with him – but, you know, he admitted himself that he was just writing what seemed reasonable to him, and that God could easily show him better tomorrow. If he had known that there were fallen human-like beings in the universe who weren't descended from Adam, he might have followed a different line of argument.»

«That may well be your opinion,» said Malcar, «but it hardly answers my question. If it was necessary for one born of man to redeem the race of men, why was it not necessary for one born of Hork-Bajir to redeem the Hork-Bajir race?»

«Because the free gift isn't like the offense,» said Teresa. «Maybe it did take a thousand different Adams to populate the galaxy with fallen beings, but that doesn't mean it takes a thousand different Christs to redeem them all. Jesus is bigger than that.»

«So he singled out your one little planet and made it the only source of salvation in the galaxy?» said Malcar. «That hardly seems fair.»

«It's no worse than what he did with the Jews,» said Teresa. «If I don't mind that my ancestors had to be in contact with Jerusalem for me to find out that I was redeemed, why should Gef mind that his race had to be in contact with Earth?»

«And I suppose you can tell me why a loving God would arrange for redemption to be carried out in such a way that most of the redeemed would die without ever knowing about it,» said Malcar. (Strictly speaking, this, being a direct attack on Christianity as such, was a distraction from her goal of persuading Teresa that a good Christian ought not to be evangelizing aliens, but by this point she was starting to feel just generally contentious.)

«I guess because time and space are part of the whole curse-of-Adam thing,» said Teresa. «We won't have them in Heaven, you know. So if Jesus was trying to use death itself to overcome death, He had to use space and time to overcome space and time – and that meant that He had to start the Church in one particular time and place, and let it spread out to the rest of the universe from there.»

«You have an answer for everything, don't you, Teresa?» Malcar sneered.

«I don't,» said Teresa. «God does.»

«I see,» said Malcar. «Then perhaps, as his self-appointed Messenger to the Stars, you can tell me what, exactly, makes you think that you – you who avoid Mexicans because of an old schoolgirl rivalry, who agree with the Dove wrappers that chocolate is the answer to every problem, who can't even remember to pray without having a schedule – what makes you think that you can be any kind of witness to a being like Gef?»

This was not, as some readers may suspect, a mere flood of vitriol, but a quite deliberate attack on one of Teresa's weaker points. Like most saints-in-the-making, Teresa was acutely aware of her own flaws (Malcar's comment about her tendency to gluttony particularly went home), and it was not irrational for her Controller to try self-doubt as her weapon when reason failed. Indeed, for a moment, it seemed to have worked.

But then, as Malcar watched, a sudden, irrational surge of strength flowed into Teresa's spirit, and she spoke with the quiet confidence of Edith Stein in the gas chamber. «That's an easy one,» she said. «The answer is: _Retro me, Satanas._»

Malcar derided this as an evasion, but Teresa said nothing more. Indeed, she said nothing more (despite Malcar's numerous attempts to provoke her) for the rest of the day, and, by evening, Malcar knew that she had lost. Unless she were to malthalamize her host so intensely as to completely break her spirit (which the Sub-Visser would surely notice, and reprimand), in two days' time Teresa Sickles would be back at her task, spreading the gospel of Christ from her cage in the Yeerk pool. Neither sophistry nor scrupulosity, it seemed, would suffice to stop her.

_And what shall I do, then, Jimur Three-Four-Five?_ Malcar thought. _You who first infested a vertebrate life-form – you who taught us the three ways o__f breaking a host –_ _what would you do, were you in my place?_

But the great Yeerk hero could give her no answer.


	20. Toloth's Bible Study

And thus it came about that, three days after Esiln Kalkat, Teresa was once again sitting in her cage in the Yeerk pool, telling Toloth Two-Nine-Four about Jesus.

There was a difference now, though. For the first time, Teresa began to suspect just how much might hang on these little conversations she was having with Toloth. Hitherto, she had thought of the affair only as an obligation (when someone asked her about her faith, she had to respond as fully and truthfully as she could); now she began to entertain the notion that it might also be a vocation. Maybe, just maybe, her job in life was to bring aliens to Christ: to help the Gospel spread to that "uttermost part of heaven" that Jesus had talked about gathering His elect from. She'd never dreamed of such a thing before – but, with God, all things were possible.

This mental upheaval sprang from a number of causes. Baptizing Gef had been a significant one; the mere realization that she had helped make one Christian alien made it imaginable that she might be called to help make more. Nor had Toloth's comment about someday being baptized himself, glib though she realized it had been, done anything to hinder her growing sense of mission. Ironically, though, the one who had really made the difference was Malcar; the energy her Controller was putting into undermining her – and, in particular, the line about her being God's "self-appointed Messenger to the Stars" that Malcar had let slip during their argument on Thursday – had been the thing that really convinced her that she might have started something important.

But, however it had come about, the awareness was now in her – and it terrified her. How was she – a random girl from California who was no closer to sainthood than nine-tenths of the rest of the people she knew – supposed to evangelize the galaxy? Wasn't there a priest or a trained theologian somewhere in the Yeerk pool who would be better cut out for the job than she was?

_Don't be silly, Teresa,_ she told herself. _This is how God works. He chooses the foolish things of the world to confound the wise – if you can call the Yeerk Empire wise. Just stay close to Him, keep doing what you've been doing, and it'll all work out somehow._

Her courage was revived at this thought, and the next day, when Toloth came to her cage, he found a more serene, self-confident young evangelist than he had yet met. "Hello, Toloth Two-Nine-Four," she said, with an apparently genuine smile. "How's my new brother doing?"

"What?" said Toloth, momentarily baffled. Then he realized she must mean Gef, and made a note that worshippers of Jesus considered each other kindred. "Oh, I see. Thank you, my host is in excellent health. This 'new life' of yours seems to suit him admirably."

"Glad to hear it," said Teresa. "So what do you want to know today?"

Toloth took a deep breath. "Your ethical code," he said. "How is one who believes the things that you believe supposed to order his life?"

Although he didn't say it, Teresa guessed that he was asking this on Gef's behalf. She tactfully didn't say anything about it, however – for which Toloth, who was all too aware how easily Teresa could see through him, was duly grateful. "Well, that's kind of a large topic, you know," she said. "I mean, I'm sure I can give you some kind of summary, but it would be a lot easier if I had a Bible or something to refer back to."

"A Baibul?" Toloth repeated. "You mean like this Baibul?" And he reached over his shoulder and produced the Skrit Na Bible from his carrying dimension.

Teresa jumped. "Where did you get that?" she said.

"From the captain of a Skrit Na freighter," said Toloth, with a certain satisfaction at having for once unsettled Teresa Sickles. "Apparently your little religion has picked up some adherents among the Foraging People."

"Oh," said Teresa. "Well, that's good. Okay, let me see it."

This proved to be easier said than done. The Skrit Na Bible was just too wide to fit through the bars of Teresa's cage, and it took a few seconds' fiddling before it occurred to Toloth to open it in the middle and slide it through top-first. This worked admirably, and in a matter of moments Teresa was holding the Bible in her hands.

She looked down at the page to which Toloth had opened it. Most of it, of course, was completely illegible to her with her rudimentary _Galard_, but she could sound out the symbols if she concentrated, and she recognized the word at the top of the page as a variation on the verb "to sing". This, combined with the presence of three-digit numbers at the tops of several columns of type, led her to conclude that she was somewhere in the book of Psalms.

That left her with two questions. First, did this Bible put the books in the same order as she was used to? Second, what passage was she looking for, anyway? Where in the Bible did you go when an alien asked you for a summary of Christian ethics? The Ten Commandments? The Sermon on the Mount? 1 Corinthians 13? None of them seemed quite complete, and all of them were fairly long; she didn't know how much time she had, and she wanted something concise.

She thought hard for a minute or two; then a way appeared to her, and she started turning to the end of the book. As it turned out, from what she could translate of the titles, the books were in more or less their traditional order; there were a few whimsical arrangements among the minor prophets (she was fairly certain, for instance, that her Bible at home put Habakkuk before Zechariah), but she still managed to find Galatians without much trouble.

Now the trick was finding the right section. She knew it was somewhere in the last two chapters, but she couldn't remember the exact verse numbers. Fortunately, though, she knew the _Galard _word for "fruit"; finding this, she traced back (with the help of a few other words, such as "flesh" and "law") to what appeared to be the beginning of the passage, and held it out for Toloth to read. "All right," she said. "Start at the place where the number 16 appears and read it aloud; I'll tell you when to stop. In English, please," she added, realizing just in the nick of time that Toloth might just read the _Galard _words that were written, which wouldn't do her much good.

Toloth looked down, and squinted at the branching letters. "'I say, then,'" he began slowly, "'Walk in the breath…'"

"The Spirit," Teresa corrected him. "That's the third Person in God, the one that puts Jesus's life in you."

"Your pardon," said Toloth sardonically. "'Walk in the Spirit, and you will not fulfill the…'" He paused, and seemed to search for the appropriate English construction. "'The flesh-desire,'" he said at last, and chuckled. "So your religion doesn't approve of desiring flesh, does it? Well, it may do well for Hork-Bajir, then, but I doubt it will ever catch on with Taxxons."

Teresa smiled. "That's not quite what it means," she said. "'Flesh', in this context, means the whole realm of natural impulses: all the ordinary, selfish, Earth-bound wants you were born with. The stuff that came with your flesh, you see."

Toloth cocked his head, and gave her an odd look. "You do like using ordinary words in strange ways, don't you?" he said. "Your realm of perfection is 'Sky', one of the persons of your God is 'the Breath', natural desires are 'flesh'…"

"Well, we have to use the words we've got," said Teresa. "If we went around inventing new words for each of our special ideas, we'd have our own separate language in no time flat. And that's not really good when we're trying to explain things to the rest of you."

"No, I suppose not," Toloth admitted. "Still, it must cause you problems not to use these words in the same way that other people do."

Teresa rolled her eyes. "You can say that again," she said. "You'd be amazed how many people think 'the flesh' in the passage you just read means 'sex'."

"Why should they think that?" Toloth inquired.

"Because that's the way we humans are," said Teresa. "Everything means sex. Never mind, just keep reading; they might come to take me to the pier any minute now."

Toloth saw the justice in this, and lowered his eyes to the page again. "'You will not fulfill the flesh-desire,'" he repeated, "'for the flesh-desire is different from the Br–' excuse me, 'from the Spirit-desire, and the Spirit-desire from the flesh-desire; and these are opposed to each other, so that you cannot do the things that you choose.'" He blinked. "What does that mean?"

"It means that, if you're a Christian, part of you wants to follow God's will, while the other part wants to do what it's always wanted to do," said Teresa. "And you have to let the Spirit direct everything you do, so that the natural part doesn't get the upper hand."

"Oh." Somewhere deep in Toloth's psyche, a small part of him responded to this. _Perhaps if the Spirit directed you, _it whispered, _you would no longer be concerned with whether you lost your Hork-Bajir-Controller status._ It was only a minute pinprick, but it left its mark.

"'But if you are led by the Spirit,'" he read on, "'you are not under the law.' That would be the law of nature, I suppose?"

"Um… kind of," said Teresa. "We'll get to that later. Just keep going."

"'Now the flesh-deeds are obvious, and they are these…'" Toloth frowned at the list that followed those words: there were sixteen terms in it, five of which he had never heard before, and three more of which made no sense at all in context.

"Something wrong?" said Teresa.

"Ah… no," said Toloth. "'They are these: _puralesku_, _ubramulku_, dirtiness, _kali-kalii_…'"

"Whoa, whoa, slow down!" said Teresa. "Pura-what?"

Toloth sighed. "I don't know," he confessed. "I thought I was quite fluent in _Galard_, but I have never heard any of these words before except for the third one."

Teresa considered. "Those are probably the sexual sins," she said. "You wouldn't talk about those much, since they're not really an issue for Yeerks, but the Andalites who invented Galard would naturally have words for them." Another thought struck her, and she nodded. "Yeah, that makes sense, since I remember the first one on the list was adultery…"

"Was what?" said Toloth politely.

Teresa blushed. "Adultery," she said. "That's when a man and a woman promise themselves to each other, and then one of them goes off and has sex with someone else. I don't suppose…"

"Oh!" said Toloth. "_Kalashi-kur_."

Teresa blinked. "What?"

Toloth grinned. "_Kalashi-kur_. That is the Hork-Bajir phrase for 'wife-badness'."

"Oh." Teresa had to take a second to digest that. She may not have had the usual noble-savage illusions about the Hork-Bajir, but it still came as something of a shock to learn that they had a word for a mortal sin that was unknown to Yeerks. "Well, yeah, that's what St. Paul's talking about. So, Gef? Don't go committing any wife-badness."

"He thanks you for the advice," said Toloth, although Gef had said no such thing. "Now, let's see; the next flesh-deed would appear to be 'statue-honor', whatever that means…"

"Idolatry, probably," said Teresa. "Worshipping false gods."

"Ah. Then sorcery, hatred, 'variation', 'emulation' – I take it those last two do not mean what I think of as variation and emulation?"

Teresa sighed; the way this was going, maybe 1 Corinthians 13 would have been faster after all. "Variation means quarrelling with other people," she said. "Emulation means wanting to have what they have, or be what they are, instead of being satisfied with what God gives you."

Toloth nodded. "'Anger, strife-causing, sedition, "lies-teaching"'…"

"Heresy."

"'Envy, murder, intoxication, revelry, and so on: of which I tell you, as I have told you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.'" The last phrase brought Toloth up short. "Now, what might that mean?" he said.

"What might what mean?" said Teresa.

"The kingdom of God," said Toloth. "I would have thought, from what you have told me of your God, that he was king everywhere and over everything. I don't suppose you mean to assert that God plans to give everything in the universe to those who follow your religion?"

Teresa smiled. "Well, yeah, actually, He will," she said. "If we follow through faithfully until we die, He'll put us as judges over angels and give us the morning star. It's all in here; you can look it up later."

Toloth stared at her. "You really mean that," he said.

"Of course I mean it," said Teresa. "And Gef? That goes for you now, too."

Toloth's mind was awhirl. Did these Jesus-worshippers – these Christians, as Teresa had called them – set _no_ reasonable limits on their beliefs? It was one thing to say, as the Kandronists of his own world did, that one who behaved in a generally upright fashion would be rewarded with peace and contentment in the afterlife – but here was someone who seemed to think that her God had promised her everything she could possibly desire, and, at the same time, expected her to surrender her body itself to others out of sheer compassion.

It was absurd, of course – but, all the same, Toloth couldn't shake a nagging feeling that it was the absurdity of truth. That was, after all, how history generally worked: you developed a sober, reasonable vision of the world, and then a Gedd fell into a pool or an Andalite ship descended from the sky, and you discovered just how much that vision fell short of the reality. This was a disturbing thought; to avoid it, Toloth lowered his eyes to the Bible and continued reading. "'But the Spirit-fruits are…'" he began, and then hesitated as he searched for the appropriate English words; most of the words on this list, though he recognized them, were not words one heard much in the Yeerk pool. "Just a moment; they are…"

"Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, forbearance, gentleness, faith, courtesy, temperance, and purity," said Teresa. "Against such as these, there is no law."

Toloth blinked. "Um… yes, that seems to be about right," he said. "Is that the point I was supposed to reach?"

Teresa nodded. "Yeah, that's it," she said.

Then she caught sight of a pair of Hork-Bajir-Controllers heading toward her cage, and frowned. "And a good thing, too," she said. "Unless I'm much mistaken, Malcar's expecting me right about now."

A cold chill shot through Toloth: if a fellow soldier saw him discussing religion with a host, he was done for. "Give me the Baibul," he said sharply.

Teresa slid it through the bars, and Toloth thrust it back into the carrying dimension and strode briskly away. When he was a safe distance from Teresa's cage, he looked back over his shoulder; the two guards were escorting Teresa to the pier, and neither of them seemed to have noticed anything irregular.

With a sigh of relief, he turned and headed back to the Sub-Visser's Bug fighter, his contentment disturbed only by the unsettling thoughts Teresa had introduced into his mind – and by Gef, who was quietly but diligently repeating, «Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness…»


	21. That They May See

At this point, it may be worthwhile to acquaint the reader with the Yeerk pool's basic system of (for lack of a better word) host-herding – the process, that is, by which involuntary hosts are conducted to cages after their Controllers leave them to feed. It is often vaguely assumed, among those who have never been infested, that each host is invariably put in the same cage – which, of course, in a culture dependent on breaking the wills of sentient beings, would be manifest idiocy. To put a host regularly in contact with the same two other hosts would foster precisely that spirit of friendship and mutual support in suffering that the Yeerk Empire worked so hard to extinguish in its human chattel.

The Sulp Niar pool of Earth, therefore, rotated its hosts every feeding cycle, according to a complex algorithm that (factoring in the continual addition of new hosts and the occasional death of old ones) effectively prevented any two given hosts from being caged next to each other twice in the same lifetime. Thus, for instance, the four conversations that Teresa had had with Toloth had each been conducted next to a different host or pair of hosts (except the second, in which Teresa had happened to be sandwiched between two empty cages).

Of course, this system produced a certain hazard of its own. If friendship between hosts became less likely, the odds that some small gesture of defiance on a host's part might inspire a neighboring host to renewed courage became all the greater as hosts were circulated. This, however, was considered by far the lesser of the two evils.

And it must be acknowledged that the system worked fairly well. One might have expected, for instance, that the sight of a Hork-Bajir-Controller coming up to a human host's cage every feeding cycle and engaging her in a lengthy dialogue on the particulars of Christian belief and practice might have attracted some attention from the neighboring hosts, and, if the neighboring hosts had been constant and known to Teresa, it might well have done so. The principle of host rotation, however, ensured that all the hosts who were imprisoned next to her during her discussions with Toloth were perfect strangers, who were generally too far gone in either rage or despair to pay any attention to the abstract philosophy next door.

On the day that Teresa and Toloth had read Galatians 5 together, however, a different sort of host happened to be occupying the cage to Teresa's right. This was Ewart Velsko, a veterinarian and amateur geologist who had been lured into the Sharing by his wife's Controller that April, and infested on the first of July. Like most hosts (including Teresa), he had done his share of screaming uselessly at his captors; after a while, however, he had come to see that there was little point in that, and had decided to make the best use of his few hours of freedom that he could. Thus, he had begun to study the floor and the bars of his cage, and work out the structure and composition of the alien minerals that composed them; by now, about five months later, he had arrived at about as thorough a knowledge of Yeerk chemical technology as a host life-form could reasonably expect to attain.

This was partially due to his remarkable ability to phase out the noise of his fellow involuntaries as they screamed or sobbed around him. It was a skill he had first developed in the operating room (since the alternative was going deaf while his patients barked in his ear), but his pool experiences had honed it to a stunning degree, so that he was now almost physically incapable of hearing anything outside his cage unless it was specially tailored to attract his attention.

It is, perhaps, something less than a credit to male humans everywhere that what thus attracted his attention to the conversation to his left was the three-word sentence, "Everything means sex." Nonetheless, so it was. His ears perked up, and he left his speculations on the lattice structure of inert actinium to focus on Teresa and Toloth – and, as a result, he became the first human to witness the missionary activities of Teresa Sickles.

The specific doctrines he heard made no particular impact on him. He was a regular churchgoer in a vague, United-Methodist way, and the basic ideas of Galatians 5 were too familiar to leave any lasting impression on his mind (although the particular form they took on in _Galard_ translation provided him a certain amount of amusement).

But that was scarcely relevant. The substance of the reading may have been commonplace, but the fact itself – the mere image of a human captive and a Yeerk soldier reading the Bible together – stirred Dr. Velsko's soul in places he hadn't realized it possessed. Even a United Methodist may well be pleased that a slave is communicating the Gospel of mercy to her captors – and impressed, also, by the courage that the slave in question is thereby shown to possess.

_That's a brave girl,_ the good doctor reflected. _Crazy, maybe, but definitely brave._

And, a few minutes later: _I wonder what her name is._

* * *

At about the same time, his Controller, Oglud Eight-Six-Nought, was learning the answer to that question.

*Teresa Sickles?* he pulsed, bewildered. *That name means nothing to me.*

*Oh?* said his hostless compatriot (a member of the Arssis spawn, whose number Oglud hadn't caught). *Well, that's a pity. We had hoped you might be able to tell us something about her.*

*But who is she?* Oglud demanded. He was understandably a bit out of sorts at being addressed during a feeding (didn't these _izcots_ have any sense of propriety?), and being questioned about a mysterious human whose name he seemed to be expected to know only added to his frustration.

*She is the human who gave herself to Oliss Three-Eight-Three,* said Arssis Whatever-It-Was solemnly.

*Oh,* said Oglud, with a dismissive gesture. *A voluntary.*

*No, that's the point,* said Arssis. *She is _not_ a voluntary. On the contrary, she hates her Controller with a passion, and yet she was still willing to give herself to Oliss Three-Eight-Three so that it could experience the visual revel on Esiln Kalkat.*

That got Oglud's attention. *Indeed?* he said. *Well, that's curious.*

*No, Arssis, that's wrong,* said another hostless Yeerk. *She doesn't hate her Controller. Remember, she doesn't think she's allowed to hate Yeerks.*

*You know what I mean, Illim Eight-Seven-Seven,* said Arssis, annoyed.

*One moment,* said Oglud, now thoroughly baffled. *Who is prohibiting this involuntary host from hating Yeerks? Her Controller? Her fellow hosts?*

*Her God,* said Illim.

*Excuse me?*

Illim emitted a chemical signature expressive of humble ignorance. *I don't know all the details,* it said, *but it seems that Teresa Sickles believes in a single god who made all sentient beings, and who expects them all to serve each other without concern for themselves. It was because of this that she offered herself to Oliss Three-Eight-Three.*

*Ah,* said Oglud, enlightened. *You mean she is a Christian.*

The two hostless Yeerks stiffened with sudden attentiveness, and their pheromone signatures began to suggest intense interest. *A Christian?* said Arssis. *Was that the word that Oliss used?*

*It may have been,* said Illim. *It certainly had a similar click structure. Tell us, Oglud Eight-Six-Naught, what is a "Christian"?*

Oglud hesitated. He was not at all comfortable with the interest these _izcots_ were showing – it didn't seem healthy for loyal subjects of the Empire to be so curious about a mere human religion – and he certainly didn't want to encourage it by getting into a lengthy discussion. On the other hand, if he refused to say anything, that might merely add the allure of mystery to the subject. Best to give a simple, concise answer, and hope that his own level-headedness might cool their ardor somewhat.

*Well,* he said, *among the humans, there are a number of groups that claim to follow the teachings of a human called Jesus Christ, who lived about twenty-three cycles ago in a country not far from where Visser One first landed when she first came to Earth. The members of these groups are collectively called "Christians"; they are very common on this part of Earth, and one of the things they espouse is the equality of all humans. So I suppose your Teresa Sickles is probably one of them.*

*Is your host a Christian?* Arssis inquired eagerly.

*Er… yes,* said Oglud. *But…*

*Are _you_ a Christian?* said Illim.

*What?* Oglud burst out. *No, of course not. There are no Yeerk Christians.*

*Why not?* said Illim. *If Christians believe that all sentient beings are supposed to serve each other…*

*Not all Christians believe that, _shapluk_,* said Oglud. *Most Christians are just like any other humans, except for a mild social veneer produced by the traditions of their particular sect. This Teresa Sickles is probably just one of the fanatics that the more primitive Christian groups produce every now and then.*

*Oh,* said Illim.

It and Arssis were silent for a moment, and Oglud breathed a little easier. One never knew, with these hostless ones, how they were liable to take things; the state of perpetual expectation they lived in had a way of keeping their emotions at a constant fever pitch. Fortunately, this also meant that they easily switched from one enthusiasm to another; presumably, in a few days, a new rumor would start sweeping through the pool about Elfangor's ghost inciting Taxxons to rebellion, and Teresa Sickles would become a thing of yesterday.

In the meantime, though…

*Are there many Christian fanatics?* Illim inquired.

Oglud groaned in spirit. *A certain number, yes,* he admitted. *But why are you asking me all this? If you are so interested in Teresa Sickles, seek out her Controller and speak to her.*

*Oh, we have,* said Arssis.

Oglud was caught off guard. *You have?*

*Certainly,* said Arssis. *She is in the pool right now. But, as I said, there is no love lost between her and her host, and the mention of Teresa's God causes her to… well, to overreact somewhat.*

That, Oglud could well believe. He couldn't even imagine what it might be like to infest one of the tireless zealots that the Pentecostal and evangelical churches, or even the Roman Catholics, seemed to churn out with such regularity. How grateful he was that his own host belonged to one of the nice, tepid "mainstream" denominations.

*She says that belief in Teresa Sickles's God is a cowardly, corrupting thing, and that no-one who held it could call itself a loyal subject of the Yeerk Empire,* Arssis continued. *That was why it seemed so strange when you said that there were no Yeerk Christians; Malcar Seven-Four-Five seems to take it for granted that there could be.*

*Perhaps there could,* Oglud conceded, *but I can't imagine why there should be. What sensible Yeerk would risk being accused of host sympathy for the sake of a primitive human religion, no different from a thousand other belief systems scattered throughout the galaxy?*

He had hoped that this less-than-subtle hint would discourage his inquirers from further interest in the subject. He was disappointed. *Really?* said Illim. *You mean that there are other religions that inspire their adherents to give themselves to their enemies out of disinterested kindness? Which ones?*

*Don't get smart with me, Illim Eight-Seven-Seven,* Oglud growled.

*Pardon?*

At this juncture, to Oglud's relief, the familiar call vibrated through the pool: *Oglud Eight-Six-Nought to the infestation pier!* He swam through the crowds of his fellow Yeerks and slithered back into his host, feeling rather annoyed that what should have been a restful sojourn in the sulp niar had been interrupted by such frivolous chatter.


	22. The Peasants Are Restless

Oglud Eight-Six-Nought was far from the only host-bearing Yeerk who was thus accosted at his feeding. Nearly everyone who had entered the pool during the previous twelve hours had found him/her/itself at the mercy of a swarm of utterly shameless _izcots_, all demanding to know something about Teresa Sickles, Jesus Christ, or (preferably) both. It was perhaps not surprising, therefore, that one of them should eventually have complained to the Sub-Visser – but, all the same, it took Toloth somewhat by surprise, when he returned to the Bug fighter, to hear his fellow guards and his commanding officer all discussing the human, and the human religion, in which he had worked so hard to conceal his own interest.

"The hostless ones seem to be correct about Teresa Sickles's status, Sub-Visser," said Kythel Three-Eight-Four, tapping on a record pad. "She is an involuntary host, infested some five Earth years ago via the Sharing; her current host is Malcar Seven-Four-Five. No other data are available; she appears to have been utterly insignificant to the Empire until three days ago."

"She is probably insignificant now," muttered Shalaf Eight-Eight-Three. "Imagine making all this fuss about the obsession of a few _izcots_…"

The low rumble of his voice rose abruptly to a scream as a bolt from the Sub-Visser's Dracon beam struck him squarely across the beak. "Shalaf Eight-Eight-Three," said the Sub-Visser coldly, "you will kindly not open your mouth again unless something intelligent is prepared to come out of it. The obsession of a few _izcots_, in the current climate, is not a trivial matter. Or need I remind you of how the Andalites recently destroyed our main ground-based Kandrona, resulting in the starvation of a great many low-ranking Yeerks? Because I assure you that the low-ranking Yeerks that survived have not forgotten it, and many of them have become more than a little disenchanted with the Visserarchy since we have shown ourselves ready to sacrifice their lives at a moment's notice. The only reason we have not yet seen an uprising among the lesser spawns is because there has been no charismatic figure to unite them; if this Teresa Sickles movement should fill that void…"

"What Teresa Sickles movement might that be, Sub-Visser?" said Toloth.

The Sub-Visser looked up. "Ah, there you are, Toloth Two-Nine-Four," he said. "So they aren't talking about it in the pool area itself, are they? Well, I suppose it's hardly surprising. If you've had all the pool's hostless pestering you about something through your feeding session, the last thing you'd want would be to rehash it with your fellow host-wearers after reinfestation."

Rank has its privileges. Had it been a fellow guardsman who had delivered that lengthy rumination in place of an answer, Toloth would have demanded somewhat abruptly that he stop blithering and come to the point; because it was the Sub-Visser, he merely waited quietly for the actual answer to arrive.

"Well," said the Sub-Visser, "very briefly, it seems that most, if not all, of the hostless Yeerks in the pool have developed a fascination with a human involuntary called Teresa Sickles. Details are sketchy, but apparently she invited one Oliss Three-Eight-Three to infest her on Esiln Kalkat so that it could partake of the visual revel; she seems to have believed that this was some sort of religious imperative."

"Indeed, sir?" said Toloth. "How strange. And you believe that this fascination on the hostless ones' part might be dangerous?"

"It's certainly possible," said the Sub-Visser. "Remember that we're here to subjugate a race of beings whose intelligence almost equals our own. That's never been done in the history of the Empire before; it's hard to say how much human values and thought processes might contaminate our own if we're not careful. One thing's certain: we don't want a significant minority of our population starting to think that humans – or at least some humans – know secrets hidden from the Yeerk race."

"How could they, Sub-Visser?" said Toloth. "Any secret that a human possesses can be learned by the Yeerk that infests it."

"Yes, but remember that the Yeerks we're talking about have never infested a sentient being," said the Sub-Visser. "And the vast majority of them never will; if they ever become Controllers, it'll be to Gedds and nothing higher. With no actual experience to teach them better, they might get the idea that sentient hosts can find ways of hiding thoughts from their Controllers – or that humans of Sickles's type receive supernatural knowledge that can't be accessed via synapse reading – or… oh, anything. Once they've convinced themselves that Sickles knows something that her Controller doesn't, they'll weave _some_ theory around it."

"Then one ought to discourage them from convincing themselves of that," Toloth observed.

The Sub-Visser gave him a look. "Yes, thank you, Toloth Two-Nine-Four, I had come to that conclusion on my own," he said. "It would be more useful if you could propose a course of action that would so discourage them."

"Why not simply kill the human Sickles?" Toloth suggested.

The Sub-Visser shook his head. "No, that won't solve the problem," he said. "It would be nice if it were that simple, but…" He broke off. "Something wrong, Toloth Two-Nine-Four?"

Toloth quickly regained control over his quivering Hork-Bajir body. "My apologies, Sub-Visser," he said. "A minor burst of host rebellion, nothing more."

And, internally: «Don't be a fool, Gef! I certainly don't want Teresa killed, and I wouldn't have proposed it if there were any danger of the Sub-Visser acting on the suggestion. As it is, though, it carries no risk and makes me look like a proper subject of the Empire. Now settle down and behave yourself, or you might not get to see your precious human again.»

"I see," said the Sub-Visser. "Well, as I say, it's not nearly as simple as that. Killing Sickles, or even Oliss Three-Eight-Three, won't stop the story from circulating – not when the entire hostless population of the Sulp Niar pool already knows the basic details." He sighed, and ran a hand through his hair. "You see, it's a legend we're dealing with here, not just a personality cult. Personality cults are easy to quell; you kill the central figure, the cult loses its motive force, and that's that. But what do you do with someone whose only importance is as a symbol of something bigger? How do you quell a legend?"

In the momentary silence that fell over the Bug fighter after these words, a sudden, mad idea came blazing into Toloth's brain. "There is only one way, Sub-Visser," he said. "We must modify the legend."

The Sub-Visser looked up at him, puzzled. "Excuse me, Toloth Two-Nine-Four?"

Toloth took a deep breath. "I have spent some of my spare time studying the human hosts in the pool," he said. "I am still far from an expert, but I believe that, with proper effort, I could construct an explanation for Teresa Sickles's behavior that would satisfy the hostless Yeerks, and perhaps even reinforce their loyalty to the Empire. I propose that I, Sub-Visser, go into the pool during the next feeding cycle and remain there until I have prevailed on the hostless ones to accept my version of the story."

There was a silence of perhaps half a minute as the Sub-Visser considered this. For Toloth, aghast at his own recklessness, it was perhaps the longest half-minute of his life.

"That is a remarkably ingenious proposal, Toloth Two-Nine-Four," said the Sub-Visser at length. "Of course, one must strike at the root of the problem, and since the root in this case is neither the host nor the Yeerk, but the story itself… yes, you're quite right, it's the only way." He shot a concerned look at his guard. "You're sure you can pull it off, though? Remember, it's not just the girl's personal motives that are in question here; you'll have to give an account of her whole religion."

"I don't think that should present me with any great difficulty, Sub-Visser," said Toloth gravely. "Provided that you give me the full three days to work, that is."

"Take six days, if you like," said the Sub-Visser. "Take as much time as you need. So long as you solve the problem in the end, I won't begrudge you a minute of it."

"Thank you, Sub-Visser," said Toloth.

The Sub-Visser sighed. "Let me tell you something, Toloth Two-Nine-Four," he said. "I have been Sub-Visser One Hundred and Sixty-Three for quite some time now. I've gone through a number of subordinates, and I've seen a fair cross-section of the Yeerk race. But I don't believe I've ever met anyone who was so thoroughly Yeerk as you."

"Thank you, Sub-Visser," said Toloth again.

* * *

After a few more minutes' worth of idle words, the guard was permitted to disperse, and Toloth withdrew to his private quarters. No sooner, however, had he thrown himself back on his tail and taken a number of deep breaths than a tap sounded on the door, and he switched it open to reveal Lissim Seven-One-Three standing in the doorway.

Lissim stepped inside, and Toloth switched the door closed again. Without further preamble, Lissim said, "You realize who this Teresa Sickles is, Toloth Two-Nine-Four?"

"I would assume it was the human whose Controller you 'arrested' on Esiln Kalkat," said Toloth calmly. "Unless there is some other human host called Teresa, which I happen to know was not the case five days ago."

"Is the rumor true?" Lissim demanded. "Did this human really let an _izcot_ into her body out of sheer good nature?"

"She did," said Toloth. "I ought to know; I selected the _izcot_ in question."

Lissim groaned, and swiped his tail against the wall in dismay. "Well, this is a pretty state of affairs," he said. "I thought it was such a joke, getting to scare some snotty little human-Controller out of her wits so you could do your research. Now I find we've precipitated an intra-pool crisis."

"A minor one, I think," said Toloth. "Despite the Sub-Visser's concerns, I doubt there is really much to fear from _izcot_ enthusiasms. Unless, of course, the Sub-Visser were to investigate them a bit further and discover what the two of us were up to on Esiln Kalkat, but I think the risk of that is now negligible."

Lissim ignored him. "So Malcar Seven-Four-Five was right, after all," he said. "We laughed when she spoke of the upheavals that her host's religion had caused, yet now we find them illustrated in our own pool." He shook his head. "Who is this human Teresa, Toloth Two-Nine-Four? And what is this power she possesses that so terrifies her Controller and so beguiles the _izcot_ spawns?"

Toloth made a non-committal gesture, as though to say that the question was of no interest to him. In the privacy of his own mind, however, he thought: _That, Lissim Seven-One-Three, is precisely what I intend to learn._


	23. Substitution

After three days of ostensible research into various alien religions, Toloth Two-Nine-Four announced that he was ready, and the Sub-Visser and several of his fellow guards accompanied him to the infestation pier.

"Good luck, Toloth Two-Nine-Four," said the Sub-Visser.

"Thank you, Sub-Visser," said Toloth. "You will, of course, see that no-one re-infests my host between now and the next feeding cycle?"

"Naturally," said the Sub-Visser, seeming surprised that he had to ask. "The Empire rewards its heroes; it doesn't wait till they're in the pool and then make off with their hosts."

Toloth said nothing, but reflected that Visser Three – or any other full Visser, for that matter – would have hardly let such a scruple keep him from reassigning so fine a Hork-Bajir host as Gef Makkil. He would, he thought, rather miss Sub-Visser One Hundred and Sixty-Three when their ways eventually parted.

"Well, then," he said, "I will see you all at the end of the next feeding cycle. May the Kandrona shine and strengthen you."

"And you, Toloth Two-Nine-Four," said the Sub-Visser, and a murmured chorus of concurrence went up from the rest of his guard.

Toloth nodded, and knelt slowly and deliberately on the pier. This served a double purpose: besides heightening the drama of the moment, and thereby reinforcing in his comrades' minds their picture of him as a bold hero of the Empire, it gave him time to send one last urgent message to his host. «Now, remember, Gef: not one word about Jesus to the other Yeerks. Not a word about Baibuls, not a word about beginning things, and definitely not a word about Teresa. You understand?»

«Yes,» said his host. «Gef not tell Yeerks about Jesus.»

«Good,» said Toloth, and began to detach himself from Gef's brain.

«Toloth tell Yeerks about Jesus?»

Toloth quickly reattached himself. «No,» he said firmly. «Toloth most certainly does not.»

«Who, then?»

«No-one,» said Toloth. «Now, if you'll just…»

«Then how Yeerks get saved?»

«I…»

"Are you waiting for something, Toloth Two-Nine-Four?" the Sub-Visser inquired acidly.

Toloth looked up at him, and attempted to assume an air of wounded dignity. "I am merely putting my thoughts in order, Sub-Visser," he said. "I wish to be as eloquent as possible when I address my hostless brethren."

The Sub-Visser seemed to accept this, and Toloth returned his attention to Gef. «Perhaps Yeerks aren't supposed to be saved,» he said. «Isn't that possible?»

«No,» said Gef firmly. «"Anyone in the universe can join". Teresa say. Gef believe.»

With great difficulty, Toloth refrained from telling Gef precisely what, at that moment, he thought of what Teresa said and what Gef believed. «Well, then, perhaps Oliss Three-Eight-Three will tell them someday,» he said. «But it is not my job, and it is not yours. Is that clear?»

Gef didn't answer immediately. His synaptic patterns were of a type Toloth had never seen before; as near as he could make out, his host was inquiring of Jesus whether it was lawful to obey one's Controller in such a case as this. Precious seconds ticked by while this curious struggle was deliberated; then, abruptly, Gef said, with decision, «Gef not tell Yeerks.»

«Thank you.»

* * *

Thirty seconds later, Toloth was in the pool, wondering, for perhaps the fiftieth time, why he couldn't be one of those forceful, resolute Yeerks who achieved mastery over their hosts without apparent effort. One couldn't imagine Lissim, or the Sub-Visser, having to cajole their hosts into silence on some important matter; they would have simply said, «If you talk about this, you will regret it very soon afterward,» and that would have been that.

On the other hand, neither could one imagine Lissim or the Sub-Visser doing what he, Toloth Two-Nine-Four, was about to do. So perhaps he made up in audacity for what he lacked in decisiveness. He could flatter himself, anyway.

With an effort, he put the matter out of his mind and turned his attention to the pool around him. It was much quieter than the reports of three days before had described, which was hardly surprising; everyone currently in the pool had already fed at least once in the past three days (except the very newest Gedd-Controllers), so there were no new Controllers left for the _izcots_ to interrogate. Toloth rather regretted this, since the relative silence of the pool would make his own actions that much more conspicuous, but he consoled himself with the thought that, even if he was overheard, only the maddest visionary would be able to guess what he was about.

He worked his palps for a moment, and then let out a call that echoed through the sulp niar: *Oliss Three-Eight-Three! Report to the northeastern corner of the pool immediately!*

With that, he settled down into his place and waited, noting with bitter satisfaction the consternation that his message had caused among the other residents of the pool. Probably the little troublemaker and its _izcot_ friends were panicking right now, wondering whether they were all about to be Kandrona-starved by order of the Sub-Visser. Well, it served them right.

After about five minutes, a small Yeerk swam up to him, its pheromone signature indicating plainly that it came from a low-ranking spawn. *Oliss Three-Eight-Three reporting as requested, _zueee_,* (5) it said.

*Very good,* said Toloth. *Tell me, Oliss Three-Eight-Three, are you familiar with a Yeerk of the Malcar spawn, designation Seven-Four-Five?*

Oliss hesitated. *I know of her, yes,* it said cautiously.

*Could you identify her in this pool?*

*No,* said Oliss, *but Arssis Five-Nought-Nine or Illim Eight-Seven-Seven could.*

*Good,* said Toloth. *Now listen carefully…*

* * *

*Malcar Seven-Four-Five to the infestation pier! Repeat, Malcar Seven-Four-Five to the infestation pier!*

Malcar rose from the bottom of the pool and shuddered softly. Time to go see how much damage that host of hers had done to the fabric of the Yeerk Empire in the past hour.

If only she could do something about it – but, for the life of her, she couldn't think what there might be to do. She'd tried undermining Teresa's sense of mission, and had only succeeded in strengthening it; she felt sure that an audience with the Sub-Visser would be pointless, and possibly hazardous to her human-Controller status as well; and as for that other wild notion that had crept into her mind while she was feeding – well, she wasn't sure she was quite that desperate yet.

She attempted to put it out of her mind, and headed for the pier. There would be time enough to brood once she was inside Teresa's head, and she didn't want to keep her fellow Controllers waiting…

_Whap!_

Malcar reeled backward, disoriented. She wasn't sure what just happened; it was as though another Yeerk had descended upon her with astonishing speed and flung itself with all its strength at her mid-section. The Yeerk capacity for pain is limited, but Malcar was smarting from the impact about as badly as her nervous system would permit, and she imagined that the other Yeerk had a similar feeling.

_Clumsy creature, _she thought. _Probably one of those poor wretches who tried to survive on oatmeal while the Kandrona was being repaired._ (This sociological development had not yet been confirmed by the Visserarchy, and therefore had not officially happened, but Malcar was the sort of person who trusted in feeding-area rumors.)

She waited a moment or two for the throbbing in her mid-section to subside, and then resumed her path to the infestation pier.

_Whap!_

Another direct blow, this time from below. What was more, it seemed, so far as Malcar was able to judge, to have been the same Yeerk as the first time. Something was very wrong here, but Malcar, woozy from the repeated blows, couldn't even begin to guess what it was.

The pier… she had to get to the pier. She roused herself, and moved forward again…

_Whap!_

And again…

_Whap!_

And again…

_Whap! Whap! Whap!_

Had Malcar been less of a child of pride, she might have realized what was going on, and conceivably even managed to fend off her assailant. In her five years as a Controller, however, she had made every effort to forget about the hostless sub-culture she had left behind, and had very largely succeeded. She had completely forgotten, for instance, that there were Yeerks among the Sulp Niar pool's _izcot_ population who still practiced the ancient art of _k'kuuut'triih_ – the unique martial art developed on the Yeerk homeworld in the generations before Jimur, by which the capacities of the Yeerk body were honed to such a pitch that it became something like a living torpedo. And ignorance, however human thinkers may extol it, was neither bliss nor strength for Malcar in this incidence.

At length, after about a minute and a half, the barrage of abuse let up, and Malcar was once more free to proceed to the pier. She was so disoriented from her ordeal, however, that she was no longer entirely sure where the pier was relative to her (or, for that matter, which side of her was up and which was down); while she was trying to work this out, the pool-speech simulator gave voice once more. *Creshkol One-Eight-Three to the infestation pier! Repeat, Creshkol One-Eight-Three to the infestation pier!*

A dim feeling of panic went through Malcar. _Wait a minute,_ she thought. _Creshkol… that can't be right. I haven't gotten to the pier yet. They should be waiting for me still, not for this Creshkol of whatever designation._

But there was no question about it. She sent out an echolocation pulse, and perceived a male Taxxon lowering his head into the pool, with a Yeerk – presumably Creshkol – swimming towards it. And after Creshkol had infested his host, Luzik Nine-One-One was summoned, and then Parsem Two-Six-Double-Nought – and so on for nearly an hour, as Malcar waited, in vain, for her name to be called again.

At last, she gave up and sank to the bottom of the pool again, her mind a frothing cauldron of fear, anger, and bewilderment. Who was it who had attacked her? Why had he/she/it done so? And, above all, _who was now Controlling Teresa?_

* * *

The infestation paralysis subsided, and Teresa felt her body raise itself from the pier. She felt her head nod curtly to the pool guards, and her feet carry her out toward the stairway that led to the pool egress.

She felt all this, but her mind was too clouded by self-pity for her to give it any particular heed. For the first time in over two weeks, Toloth hadn't showed up at her cage while Malcar was feeding – and, although she hadn't realized it, she had come rather to depend on her conversations with Toloth to keep the agony and despair of the Yeerk pool from overwhelming her own soul. The Word of God strengthens those who preach it as well as those who hear it, and the inability to preach can leave a young missionary quite bereft of strength.

Nor did it make matters any better when a mocking voice in her mind said, «Well, Teresa Sickles, have you no word for your old friend?»

«I'd hardly call us _friends_, Malcar,» Teresa snapped. She knew it wasn't the charitable thing to say, but only a small portion of her cared at that moment.

«What was up with you today, anyway?» she added. «You've never taken that long to reinfest me before.»

An amused chuckle echoed through her consciousness. «No, I certainly haven't,» her Controller said. «However, if it will console you any, I have taken that long to reinfest Gef on a number of occasions.»

Whatever response Teresa had expected, it hadn't been that. «What… what do you mean?» she whispered.

There was no response in words. Instead, Teresa's mind was suddenly flooded with a series of brief mental images: the inside of Sub-Visser One Hundred and Sixty-Three's Bug fighter, a Na scurrying forward with a blood-red Bible in his hands, her own face as seen through the bars of an involuntary host's cage. All of them images that, so far as she knew, only one person of her acquaintance had ever seen.

For some minutes, Teresa was as incapable of mental speech as of physical. Only when her new Controller had left the pool area and was halfway to the Gleet BioFilter did she find the strength to murmur, «You'll be the death of me yet, Toloth Two-Nine-Four.»

* * *

(5) _Zueee_: The opposite of _shapluk_ – a form of address used by low-ranking Yeerks to their extreme superiors. Because of the disparity of rank it represents, it is rarely used by any other than hostless Yeerks, and consequently is generally unknown in Verbal Yeerkish. The spelling given is therefore a rough attempt to transliterate the high-pitched whistling sound that Oliss Three-Eight-Three used on this occasion, which is the correct form of the word in Pool, or Pure, Yeerkish.


	24. All the Law and the Prophets

By the time Toloth had mounted Teresa's bicycle and begun heading for the Sickles house, he had begun to wonder whether it mightn't have been wiser to leave Teresa in ignorance of his true identity. He had thought that his dramatic self-revelation would stun her into mental silence, and he would be able to comb her mind in peace for the information that would satisfy Gef and the _izcots_ – but he had failed to reflect that this was Teresa Sickles he was dealing with. As soon as she had processed that her new Controller was the very Yeerk that she had been witnessing to for the past half-month, she had begun eagerly bombarding him with questions about how he had managed it, where Malcar was now, what the Sub-Visser was going to think, et cetera.

At first, Toloth had thought that this was mere, impudent curiosity on her part, and had resented the assumption (accurate though it was) that he was the sort of weak-willed Yeerk who would sooner satisfy a host's curiosity than malthalamize her for daring to address him. But then he noticed an undercurrent of anxiety running through her interrogation, and realized that there was something else going on – something, if possible, even more painful to the shred of Yeerk pride he had left. Somehow, in the course of the past few weeks, Teresa had begun to care intensely about him – had even begun, in some sense, to truly think of him as a friend.

Only a very limited sense, of course. She still had no interest in discussing her favorite books with him, or inviting him over for a game of Uno, or any of the other things that she remembered doing with her human friends. What she felt about him was subtly different; it seemed to Toloth almost to resemble self-interest, except that it wasn't directed towards the self. Teresa seemed to feel the same passionate concern about his well-being, and seemed ready to take the same unequivocal delight in it, that a sensible being did about its own.

It was a phenomenon that Toloth had never encountered in a host before. Even a Hork-Bajir, though he would willingly sacrifice himself for his tribe, would never have thought to feel concern for some other tribe in which he had no stake. Teresa, on the other hand, seemed to be making an effort to feel this way about every sentient being she knew; one of the dominant distress patterns in her mind was connected to the fact that she couldn't bring herself to feel it for Malcar. It was an enigma, to be sure – but it did explain a number of puzzling things about Teresa Sickles, and Toloth was quite willing to accept one enigma in place of half a dozen.

The difficulty was to know how to respond. Reciprocating the impulse was obviously impossible, since one couldn't simultaneously desire a being's welfare and continue to support a plan of conquest that involved robbing it of all that made life worth living. But if one failed to reciprocate the impulse, that was far worse, since the one quality that Yeerks honored above all (for obvious reasons) was strength of will; to observe a host making such a heroic act of will without apparent effort, and then to acknowledge by one's inaction that one dared not do the same, was tantamount to acknowledging that a host was worthy of greater honor than oneself – which was impermissible. The very existence of the impulse, in fact, presented a loyal Yeerk with an insoluble dilemma – which perhaps explained why Malcar Seven-Four-Five, that paragon of loyalty, seemed bent on eradicating it from Teresa's mind.

Toloth himself preferred to ignore it. (For the time being, at least. He knew, instinctively, that he would have to face the dilemma sooner or later, but a host of prudential considerations urged him not to do so now.) He had more practical matters to attend to; if he didn't start answering Teresa's questions soon, she might well work herself into a state of nervous prostration, and then it would be exceedingly difficult to draw the necessary information from her mind in the way he intended.

«I assure you, Teresa Sickles, neither Gef nor I am in any danger,» he said. «I have simply decided that my means of acquiring information from you have hitherto been inefficient and occasionally hazardous. I am therefore borrowing you from Malcar Seven-Four-Five for a single feeding cycle, so that I can absorb the data I need directly from your brain. Once I have finished, I will probably never need to contact you again – which will doubtless gratify you and your Controller as much as it does me.»

Teresa wasn't sure that anything short of Toloth and Gef both dropping dead would truly gratify Malcar, but she didn't suppose it would edify anybody for her to say so. «You're not going to tell me that Malcar agreed to this, though, are you?» she said. «I can't imagine…»

«No,» said Toloth, with a note of amusement tingeing his mental speech. «No, Malcar Seven-Four-Five certainly did not agree to this, nor did I waste my time on such a hopeless cause as persuading her to do so. But there are other ways of preventing someone from arriving at the infestation pier.»

Teresa wondered what that was supposed to mean. It couldn't mean that Malcar was dead, or permanently incapacitated, since Toloth had definitely said that she was going to be gratified when… or had he? Now that Teresa thought about it, all he had actually said was "you and your Controller"; could that mean…?

Toloth's voice interrupted her thoughts. «No, Teresa Sickles,» he said. «Malcar Seven-Four-Five is still your Controller; there is no reason to celebrate just yet.»

Teresa was stung; she had, in fact, been close to celebrating at the thought of Malcar's demise, but she hadn't quite admitted it to herself. Now that Toloth had said the word, though, she felt herself duly chastened, and sent up a quick prayer for forgiveness. This, of course, didn't escape the attention of her current Controller, who demanded to know why she was doing anything so irrational. «What is culpable in desiring Malcar Seven-Four-Five's demise?» he said. «She has, I should think, given you ample reason to believe that the universe would benefit from such an event.»

«Maybe it would,» Teresa acknowledged, «but I'm still not allowed to wish for it. Jesus told us to love our enemies; if I'm not at least trying to do that, I can't really call myself a Christian.»

There it was again, that bizarre imperative to make another's good your own – to love, as Teresa called it. (It was hardly the Yeerk sense of the word, but Toloth could handle that; he remembered the discussion they had had, three days before, about the peculiar senses that Jesus-worshippers gave to common words.) It was, Toloth admitted, a praiseworthy feat – but the question was, why? What did they stand to gain from it? What possible good could it do Teresa to take this Yeerk, who fervently believed that the subjugation of her and her race was a good and proper end wherewith to devote one's life, and act as though the two of them were adjacent spawn-mates?

It might have been supposed that, Toloth being now in direct contact with Teresa's mind, the answers to these questions would have been immediately apparent to him. And, indeed, he could quite plainly perceive what Teresa's answer would have been – but it was an answer that helped him not at all. Indeed, it was an answer he already knew – the answer that his host had heard, to the same question, nearly three weeks before – the answer that had thrown his subsequent life into such turmoil.

_Because Jesus would want me to._

That was it. That was where Teresa Sickles began and ended every discussion. What Jesus said overruled all other considerations – not because it made sense to her, or because it would keep her safe, or even because she would be happy after her death if she did (although she did seem to believe this), but simply because Jesus was who – and what – he was. Without him, she could do nothing; if she had not him, she had not life; he had made her for himself, and her heart had no rest until it rested in him – there were a thousand variations on the theme in her mind, but what they all amounted to was that pleasing this minor claimant to the throne of deity was the only reason that Teresa knew for doing anything.

This was more than Toloth had been prepared to handle. He had gathered that Teresa viewed Jesus as the creator of the universe – yes, and also as a personal benefactor who was willing to give her some sort of "new life". So he had expected her to feel some measure of reasonable gratitude, expressed perhaps in some ritual observances of a symbolic nature: fasts, sacrifices, all the usual accoutrements of natural piety. But this total self-surrender was another matter entirely. Toloth had never heard of a god – apart from the truly savage ones, such as the "Thirst-Soul" of the pre-conquest Taxxons – who demanded such fidelity from his worshippers. And that someone like Teresa (whom no sane person could compare with a pre-conquest Taxxon) should gladly and whole-heartedly accept such an obligation… who could have imagined it?

Except, perhaps, Gef. Wasn't that what he had said, back at the beginning of it all? _"Teresa have knowledge of beginning things. Things that make life, that know why things live."_ Toloth had dismissed it at the time, but, really… to know why things live… wasn't that what all sentient beings were looking for? Wouldn't Toloth himself have given everything he had – his host, his position, his very self – to know the reason for _his_ existence? And Teresa, it seemed, thought that she had found it. Which made her attitude perfectly rational.

_But this is absurd,_ Toloth wanted to say. _You cannot possibly believe, you pitiful human child, that the ultimate power behind the universe would simply come and tell you what it wants of you. That would be kindly, and the universe is not kindly; it would be rational, and the universe is not rational. The universe is a mindless, soulless, utterly savage wilderness, and you of all beings have no excuse for not knowing it. Look at me: am I the product of a benevolent creator? Would your Jesus make a race of beings whose fulfillment lay in the subjugation of other beings? I think not._

For this he could find no answer in Teresa's mind. Teresa, as has already been noted, had often struggled with the problem of why God had made Yeerks; the few, hesitant solutions she had come up with – that their nature was a result of their Fall, for instance – were unsatisfactory even to her, and Toloth found them utterly laughable.

This gave some ease to his mind. He knew, of course, that there were weaknesses in every system of thought, and that this didn't necessarily make them untrue (Andalite harmonic theory had its vague spots, too, but you could still build Dracon beams with it), but, all the same, he was grateful to have found Christianity's weakness so quickly. If he hadn't, he might have had to start seriously considering it as the key to his own life – and that, of course, would have been completely unacceptable.

* * *

He became aware that Teresa had ceased to inquire about what had happened to Malcar. This was probably just as well; the less she knew, the less Malcar would know when she reinfested her.

He also became aware that he had reached Teresa's house – and that a large, black, furry creature with sharp teeth had leapt off the porch and was heading towards him at a great speed. For a moment, he was alarmed; then he noticed a minor memory of Teresa's that he had hitherto overlooked, and his alarm changed to mild annoyance. So humans kept large, predatory animals around their homes for companionship, did they? Someone might have warned him.

He stopped Teresa's bicycle, clambered awkwardly off the seat (Teresa had never mastered the art of dismounting in a ladylike fashion), and greeted the Sickles family schnauzer with a vigorous nuzzle behind the ears. "Hey there, Chris," he cooed. "Who's a good boy?"

Chris's tail wagged enthusiastically, and his tongue lolled out of his mouth as though it were detached from his jaw. Toloth was repelled, but he kept up the pretense long enough to seem like Teresa to anyone who might be watching; then he took up the bicycle again and wheeled it into the garage, with Chris trotting close at his heels.

As he leaned the bicycle against its usual wall, he became aware of a distinctive aroma wafting through the door to his immediate right. It wasn't as vivid as it would have been through Gef's nose (he had been mildly disappointed to find how weak the human olfactory sense was), but it was unmistakable, even so.

«So your mother is making Roman gnocchi, is she, Teresa?» he said.

«Yeah, I guess so.» Teresa sounded surprised. «Funny. She wouldn't usually make something that festive before Advent was over – unless we were having company, of course.»

Then she laughed. «But we are having company, aren't we?» she said. «Maybe some angel whispered into her ear this morning, "Word to the wise, Catherine: you're having a Sub-Visserial Guardsman over for dinner tonight. Better make something special."»

Toloth smiled quietly with Teresa's lips. For all her theological sophistication, Teresa Sickles was still very much a child in many ways.

«Well,» he said, «if I am, indeed, your guest of honor tonight, I suppose I ought to go in and pay my respects to my hostess.»

«Oh, sure,» said Teresa. «Don't call her "ma'am", though; she hates that. "Mrs. Sickles" will do fine.»

«I will bear that in mind,» said Toloth dryly.

He turned, and reached for the knob of the house door. Just as he was about to grasp it, though, he hesitated. A strange, almost superstitious thought had entered his mind, inexplicable and irrational, yet one that bore a strange conviction. For some half-dozen heartbeats, he stood motionless before the door, trying to dismiss the thought, yet only succeeding in impressing it more and more deeply upon his mind: _Beware, Toloth Two-Nine-Four. If you enter this house, you will not leave it again without being transformed._

Teresa seemed puzzled. «Something wrong, Toloth?» she said.

Toloth roused himself. «No,» he said. «Nothing at all.»

He hummed a few bars of an old Yeerkish war-song to steady himself; then he turned the doorknob (more firmly than was perhaps warranted) and entered the home of Teresa Sickles.


	25. Of a Sweet Savor

Catherine Sickles glanced up from the counter she was wiping at the sound of her daughter's tread on the kitchen linoleum. "Oh, there you are, Teresa," she said, with an arch of her eyebrow. "We were beginning to wonder if we would have to call out the gendarmes."

Toloth didn't answer immediately, though he knew he ought to. The lapse was excusable; he had never been trained for racial infiltration, and consequently had never learned the knack of instantly locating and reproducing the appropriate response-pattern for any situation. And, to do him justice, he was hardly the first being to be unmanned by his first encounter with human cooking.

It was the smell that got him. He knew, of course, what _gnocchi Romana_ smelled like while it was baking: he had at his disposal all of Teresa's quite vivid memories on the subject, which was how he had recognized it through the door. But memory is a poor substitute for direct experience, and smelling something through a closed door is nothing like being in the same room with it. The air around him was filled with an aroma at once rich, sharp, and beguiling, like nothing else he had ever known; he found himself wishing that he still had Gef's nose, so that he could do it justice.

Then he changed his mind. A Hork-Bajir body would have been inadequate to this experience. Hork-Bajir were herbivores, and highly specialized herbivores at that; the smell of warm animal fat would have no magic for them. Until now, Toloth, having never really encountered carnivorous races other than the Taxxons, had thought of the predatory instinct as a crude, coarsening thing; he had never imagined that the meat-eaters of the universe had such sublime pleasures reserved for them.

Mrs. Sickles's laughter broke into his thoughts. "Well, I can see I'll have satisfied one person tonight, anyway," she said. "It's so nice to have a daughter who appreciates your work."

The comment roused Toloth from his reverie, and he realized that he needed to get into character quickly before Mrs. Sickles started wondering what was wrong with her daughter. Hastily, he dipped into Teresa's superego and extracted the first appropriate response he could find. "Well, I'm glad I could brighten your day, Mom. I just wish it didn't show up on me the way it does."

Mrs. Sickles's eyes narrowed. "Now, Teresa," she said sternly, "there are more important things in this world than looking like an underwear model."

"Oh, sure, I know that," said Toloth, striving to put just the right amount of indifference to the fact into Teresa's voice. "But it's still not much fun, being stuck in a body like this." (The irony of the words didn't strike him until much later.) "I mean, what do people see when they look at me? What do they…"

"They see a beautiful, intelligent, and virtuous young woman," said Mrs. Sickles. "Not perfect, maybe, but with a truer heart and a more sincere love of Our Lord than 99% of the other people they're likely to meet. And that's what's important, not your waist measurement."

Her intensity left Toloth momentarily stunned. He recognized that he was seeing another instance of what the Jesus-worshippers called love, but this was quite a different thing from Teresa's gentle solicitude. It was a fiercer, more aggressive form of the impulse; anything that could harm her daughter had to be opposed, even if it was only her daughter's own self-denigration. (Toloth wondered what she would have done to Malcar, had she known of her existence. Probably it was best not to speculate.)

For lack of a better response, he smiled sheepishly and flushed some extra blood into Teresa's cheeks. "Well, thanks, Mom," he murmured. "I love you, too."

Mrs. Sickles's expression relaxed, and she leaned over and planted a kiss on her daughter's forehead. "So what have you been up to today?" she said.

Toloth had to check that; what _was_ Teresa supposed to have been doing all afternoon? Ah, there it was.

"Oh, you know," he said, waving a vague hand. "Setting up the Community Center for the fête tomorrow."

"Oh, yes, your Sharing thing," said Mrs. Sickles. "I wanted to talk to you about that, actually…"

But before she could get any further, a timer on the counter began to beep, and she interrupted herself to turn it off, sweep over to the stove and remove the lid from a pan that Toloth hadn't hitherto noticed.

Instantly, the room began to fill with another scent entirely – a scent that set the seal on Toloth's newfound conviction that carnivores were favored beings. There had been a note of it in the air before, but the strong tang of the _gnocchi Romana_ had overpowered it; now, with the lid no longer in the way, the rich savor of frying meat came into its own. The juices that had once been life to some brute animal now filled the air as steam; as Toloth breathed them in, they sang to his borrowed body of strength and vigor, and invited him to make that strength his own. And in its train came other aromas, of garlic and thyme and salt and fish and (faintly) wine, each with its own wealth of associations to set the human mouth a-water.

He checked Teresa's memories, which supplied the odor with a name – and some other details that seemed to call for some comment, which Toloth accordingly made. "Mom!" he said. "Pan-fried lamb _and_ Roman gnocchi? Today, with Advent still going on? What's gotten into you?"

Mrs. Sickles affected a wounded expression. "Don't you like it?" she said. "I thought you'd be excited."

"Of course I'm excited," said Toloth. "I'm thrilled, but… why? The Pope didn't move Christmas to today when I wasn't looking, did he?"

"Not that I heard," said Mrs. Sickles.

"Well, then, what's the occasion?"

Mrs. Sickles smiled. "Ah, yes, the occasion," she said. "The occasion is waiting for you in the living room. Why don't you go and greet her?"

This coy response baffled Toloth, who had little feel as yet for the whimsicality of human converse. «"Her"?» he repeated, annoyed. «What does she mean, "her"? An occasion has no sex; it is an event, not a life-form.»

Teresa made a mental shrug. «That's my mom for you,» she said. «She loves to keep people guessing.»

«Ah,» said Toloth. «Well, that was to be expected. Such an incorrigibly enigmatic creature as you had to learn it from somewhere.»

Teresa laughed. «Coming from you, Toloth, I'll take that as a compliment,» she said.

She tried to be glib about it, but the silent thoughts that accompanied the remark told a different story. It was painfully clear to Toloth that she was in a state of relief bordering on elation, simply because she had been infested for nearly an hour and had yet to hear her Controller belittle either her person or her faith. For the host of Malcar Seven-Four-Five, such an experience was all but unprecedented.

It surprised Toloth how deeply this affected him. He had always, of course, detested Yeerks who tormented their hosts unnecessarily, believing (though he had never succeeded in putting it into practice) that hosts should be taught their place by firm and quiet mastery rather than petty maliciousness. It would, therefore, have been quite natural for him to feel outraged at Malcar's abuse of Teresa, just as a human horseman might be outraged at the mistreatment of a fine mare. What he actually felt, however, was something quite different. He found it distasteful that Teresa's feelings should be lightly hurt, not because she would thereby become less valuable (though that was likely true) or because it showed her Controller to be a person of vulgar feeling (though that was certainly true); rather, it seemed to him that his own dignity was thereby impugned.

As he then was, he could make no sense of this feeling. He still considered himself to be a believer in the policies of the Yeerk Empire, and of the philosophy of Yeerk superiority that underlay them. It was true that he had been somewhat shaken during his first encounter with Teresa, and that he had briefly doubted that the Yeerk mind was more subtle than the human, but he told himself that he had overcome that moment of weakness. He failed to recognize that he had, in fact, merely chosen to disregard it, and that this had caused the doubt to become all the greater, to the point where it was now dictating nearly all his actions. When one's basic assumptions are questioned, one must either defend them or abandon them; any other course ends in complete unreason.

Had Toloth admitted to himself that he was far from sure of human inferiority to Yeerks, he would have understood his emotions perfectly. For nearly a month, he had been coming to Teresa to acquire knowledge, and it is a universal law that the person who possesses knowledge is worthy of greater honor than the person who seeks it. It was therefore quite reasonable for Toloth (regarding Teresa as, in fact, a person, rather than as the mere tool he wished to think her) to feel that anyone who showed contempt for Teresa implicitly showed even greater contempt for him.

But he would see none of this, and dismissed the feeling as mere irrationality. It was vital that he keep his head; if he let the strangeness of his surroundings overwhelm his reason, he was done for. He remembered that strange, premonitory feeling he had had at the door; he had no intention of being transformed, in mind or in body, and he would see to it that he wasn't.

_Remember why you have come, Toloth Two-Nine-Four, _he told himself. _You are here to determine the essence of Jesus's allure to host life-forms and _izcots_, not to be beguiled into going human yourself. Study them if you will, but never forget the difference between them and you. They are ruled; you are ruler. They are low; you are high. They are…_

His thoughts were interrupted by a sudden squeal of glee from Teresa. All this while, without really reflecting on it, he had been heading towards the living room, in obedience to Mrs. Sickles's suggestion. Now, turning a corner, he found that he had arrived there – and a small, elderly woman was rising from the sofa, her wrinkled face split with a wide smile. "Well, now," she said, "how's my favorite granddaughter doing?"

Toloth had no need to search for the appropriate, Teresa-like response; it was written in every line of his host's cerebellum. "Nana!" he exclaimed, and rushed headlong into the living room to embrace the old lady.

"Now, now, duckling, easy does it," said Agnes Chiodini, working an arm free so she could tousle her granddaughter's hair. "Remember, I'm held together with wires these days. The joys of old age…"

"Sorry," said Toloth. "It's just… well, you know, I haven't seen you in ages, and now you're here all of a sudden, and… well, it's just nice to see you." For full effect, he sent an impulse to Teresa's lachrymal glands, causing her eyes to sparkle with a hint of unshed tears.

It seemed to do the trick. Mrs. Chiodini made that little popping noise with her tongue that Teresa was so familiar with, the import of which was _I'm terribly pleased by your affection, but I'll be drummed out of the Crusty Old Ladies' Society if I say so directly_.

"Well, it's nice to see you, too, Teresa Catherine," she said. "Still living up to that name, I trust?"

This time Toloth did have to search for the proper response. The reference was a complicated one; it involved the coincidence of Teresa's two given names with the names of the only two female humans (until about three months previous) to be officially honored as great explicators of Jesus's teachings. Apparently, this fact had not been in her parents' minds when they had given her these names, but it had gained a particular appositeness when, in the course of preparing for a certain initiation ceremony, she had developed such an intense interest in the _why_ and _how_ of her religion. Ever since, her family members had alternately teased and commended her for thus following in her namesakes' footsteps.

Knowing this, Toloth had no hesitation – indeed, he took a certain ironic satisfaction – in nodding Teresa's head and saying, "Oh, definitely."

"Good," said Mrs. Chiodini. "You keep it up. That's what the Church needs more of: smart, pious young women who don't spend all their time fussing because they can't be priests. Do you know what I heard Sister Anastasia say the other day? She said that even if the Pope did say _ex cathedra_ that priests have to be men, she wouldn't listen, because God gave her the right to think for herself." She snorted. "I'd just like to know what she plans to think about, if she doesn't believe that anyone can tell her any facts."

Toloth ignored this. "What are you doing here, anyway?" he said. "Isn't Uncle John still taking good care of you, out in Sioux Falls?"

"Certainly he is," said Mrs. Chiodini. "Your Uncle John is a gift from Heaven. I've always said so, and I always will. But the other day I woke up and said to myself, 'You know, Agnes, you have five other children scattered all across the country, and one of them has that charming daughter who's going to redeem her generation someday. Why don't you get on a plane and give her a nice little Christmas surprise?' So I wheedled some funds out of your Aunt Lucy, telephoned your mother to make sure she didn't have any conflicts, and… well, here I am."

"So you'll be spending Christmas with us?" said Toloth. He tried to sound as eager and excited as Teresa would have been (and, in fact, was), but the truth was that all he felt was annoyance. The next three days were all the opportunity he had for getting at the hidden power of Christianity, and he was beginning to wonder whether even an hour of them would turn out as he had expected. Bad enough that he had apparently chosen to infest Teresa just before a major religious festival (though that might, perhaps, turn out to have its advantages); worse that she seemed committed to participating in a Sharing program the next day; and who could say what further complications this adored and clearly strong-minded kinswoman might introduce? Was all of nature conspiring to derail his plans?

"That's right," said Mrs. Chiodini. "I finally get to see one of these 70-degree California winters of yours. Ought to make a refreshing change from having an ice rink on the sidewalk from Thanksgiving to Lent."

"And that was what I wanted to ask you about, Teresa," said Mrs. Sickles, appearing suddenly in the living-room doorway. "This fête of yours, or whatever you call it: you say anyone can just walk in, can't they? No cover charge?"

"That's right," said Toloth. "There's a suggested donation of $5 towards the Sharing's overseas projects, though."

"Well, I've been to enough church potlucks to know what that means," Mrs. Chiodini muttered. "I'll just have to call their bluff, I suppose. If anyone squawks about it, I'll tell them that my life savings is in a coffee can half a continent away, and after what happened five years ago, I'm not about to bring it anywhere near Los Angeles."

"Oh, don't worry, Mama," said Mrs. Sickles. "We'll cover for you."

"You most certainly won't," said Mrs. Chiodini. "If they call it a suggestion, that's what it is. I'm not going to have my daughter and her husband $5 poorer on my account, not unless they actually come out and say that it's a fee."

«She's coming to the fête?» said Teresa, delighted. «Oh, Nana, I wish I had control of my body so I could kiss you.»

This seemed odd to Toloth. «If you care about her so deeply, why should you want her to attend a Sharing event?» he said. «Aren't you worried that we will lure her in?»

«Nana?» Teresa laughed. «Hardly. She's never joined anything smaller than the Church in her life; she won't even vote in primaries. If you capture her, it'll be because Visser Three's launched an open attack on South Dakota, not through the Sharing. See, that's why it's so special: she can't stand groups and activities like this, but she'll come to this one anyway, because it's important to me.»

«I see,» said Toloth. «And if she were willing to join the Sharing because that was important to you? Would that also be "special"?»

He saw sudden fear blaze up in Teresa's mind. «You don't mean you'd…»

«Just answer the question,» said Toloth coldly. He wasn't sure, himself, why he was asking; certainly it wasn't because he intended to make himself conspicuous by recruiting Agnes Chiodini for infestation. Perhaps he merely wished to convict Teresa of wishful thinking.

Teresa thought intensely for a moment or two. «Well,» she said slowly, «I'd be worried about her, of course, and I'd have to pray for her – actually, I should probably do that anyway – but I don't suppose that would change what it meant for her to do it. So yeah, I guess it would be special.»

It was as measured and realistic a response as any sentient being could have given. Toloth was vaguely annoyed.

_There is nothing to be annoyed about, _he reminded himself. _Her capacity for judiciousness is not a threat to you. She is lesser; you are greater. She is subject; you are master._

And it was consoling, in its way. He had a feeling, though, that it would come to sound somewhat monotonous during the days ahead.


	26. Speech Finely Framed

In the midst of all this, he heard the door swing open, and Teresa's father's voice rang out in the kitchen. "Well, well, this looks scrumptious," he said. "Trina, dear, you mind if I…"

"Don't you touch a thing, Clarence," Mrs. Sickles called, and turned to Toloth. "Teresa, honey, could you go and set the table? I think your father would have less temptation if someone were in there with him, even if it was just to fetch silverware."

"Sure," said Toloth. "Nana, where do you want to sit?"

"Oh, it doesn't matter," said Mrs. Chiodini. "Just find me a place, and I'll squeeze into it. Not at the head, though; I'm not out to usurp your parents."

"Mama, the dining table's round," said Mrs. Sickles.

"Well, all the more reason not to fuss about places, then," said Mrs. Chiodini.

«I'd put her across from Dad,» Teresa said as Toloth left the living room. «Mom and I would both want to sit next to her.»

«I am well aware what you would do, Teresa,» said Toloth sharply.

There was a momentary silence inside Teresa's brain; then its owner said, sullenly but nonetheless sincerely, «Sorry.»

Toloth didn't respond. He had actually wanted to say a good deal more – all about how Teresa's favored courses of action were not currently the issue, and how presumptuous it was of her to assume that someone who could read all her thoughts with perfect ease still needed her to tell him anything. But it had seemed to him that there was no way to say this without sounding, in his own ears, like Malcar Seven-Four-Five. So he had contented himself with the one sentence, which seemed to suffice to put Teresa in her place.

He did use her proposed seating arrangement, though. After all, it was what she would have done.

* * *

"Bless us, O Lord," Mr. Sickles declaimed, "in these Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty, through Christ our Lord."

Toloth duly added Teresa's voice to the chorus of _Amens_ that followed, though he wasn't at all clear on what the word meant. Indeed, he was rather mystified by the whole notion of begging favors from one's God every time one sat down to table; did humans consider eating such a momentous event as to invariably attract the attention of the Almighty?

Perhaps. Considering what they seemed able to make of it, Toloth was almost inclined to grant them the point. In all his lifetime of Kandrona, pond-weed, and unseasoned tree bark, he had never dreamed of anything like Catherine Sickles's cooking; here was food that appealed not only to the brute needs of the body, but also to the longing for order, for the harmonizing of diverse parts into a triumphant whole, that was the hallmark of the sentient mind. It was like the Andalite mating dance, or the breaching ritual of the Kaza'haa: the humans had taken one of the great intractable appetites of the animal nature, and made something out of it that could almost be called an art form.

Or, as Teresa put it, «More calories than you can shake a stick at, but it's worth every one of them.»

Nor, it seemed, was a human feeding period devoted solely to mere feeding. Perhaps they wanted to linger over their triumph (in contrast to host-bearing Yeerks, who equated feeding with vulnerability), or perhaps it was simply the principle that all the arts are of a spawn; in any event, Toloth had barely tasted the lamb before the table turned into a conversational forum.

It was Teresa's grandmother who set the thing in motion – unsurprisingly to Toloth, who had already gathered, from her previous conversation and from Teresa's memories, that Agnes Chiodini rarely lacked for things to say. After tasting the gravy-slathered gnocchi and pronouncing it superior to anything that John Chiodini's poor wife knew how to make ("not that Amy isn't a fine person in other ways"), she addressed herself to her son-in-law across the table. "Now, I want you to tell me something honestly, Clarence," she said, pointing her fork at him with a no-nonsense air. "In your opinion, do I look Jewish?"

Mr. Sickles seemed momentarily stunned. It didn't take much digging into Teresa's memories for Toloth to discover why; discussing the various sub-groupings of the human race was, it seemed, the greatest taboo of the current Earthly culture, and the people known as the "Jews" had a particularly sacrosanct status in this respect. There had apparently been some lurid assault upon them in recent history by another people, and, ever since, the peculiar sympathy that humans felt for the weak had rendered anything resembling irreverence or lightness, with respect to them, more or less unthinkable.

Such, at any rate, was what Teresa seemed to believe was the cause of her father's perplexity. The matter, however, was complicated, for the mention of "Jews" called up many other thoughts in Teresa's mind besides that of social convention. It seemed that the Jews were intimately connected with the cult of Jesus – that Jesus had, in fact, been a Jew himself, and that his worshippers viewed their religion as the culmination of this people's beliefs and practices. It also seemed, however, that the Jews constituted a rival religion to that of Jesus. How both things could be true at once, he wasn't clear – nor did he see how Malcar Seven-Four-Five could believe in the supernatural strength of the Christian religion if its parent people was so weak as to need a social taboo to preserve its dignity. He yearned to penetrate deeper into Teresa's mind and solve the riddle, but he knew that he couldn't afford the distraction; he dared not seem less attentive to the others at the table than Teresa would have been.

With an effort, he returned his attention to Mr. Sickles, and caught the tail end of his reply: "…say so, no. Why?"

"Well," said Mrs. Chiodini, "the other day, I was walking down Minnesota Avenue, and there was a young man handing out brochures for… something or other, I didn't notice what. Anyway, he kept wishing everyone who passed by, 'Merry Christmas!… Merry Christmas!' – and then, as I walked past, he gave me a knowing leer and said, 'Happy holidays.'"

Mrs. Sickles burst out laughing – a laugh that ended in a choked gasp, as she had happened to take a drink of water just at that moment. Mr. Sickles chuckled, too, and Toloth, though he only vaguely saw the point of the story, felt it wise to let out a stifled giggle himself.

"Now, Heaven knows I don't mind giving off the air of an Old-Testament matriarch," Mrs. Chiodini continued, "but I looked pretty carefully in the mirror when I got home that day, and for the life of me I couldn't see anything particularly Semitic about myself. So it seems to me there's a mystery here worth solving."

"I don't know about that," said Mr. Sickles thoughtfully. "I'd say it's pretty simple, actually. The surprising thing is that it's never happened to you before."

"Oh?"

"Well, living in Sioux Falls, I mean," said Mr. Sickles. "Pretty much everyone else up there is a German or a Swede, and here you come along with the Mediterranean written all over you. The poor fellow handing out brochures doesn't know one end of the Mediterranean from the other; he has to make a quick guess, and he knows that there's a synagogue somewhere in the city, so…" He shrugged. "Hard to blame him, really."

This seemed to strike Mrs. Chiodini as plausible. She took another forkful of gnocchi and nodded thoughtfully. "It could be, yes," she said. "Of course, I shouldn't really trust your explanations, Clarence, since finding clever excuses for people is how you earn your living, but in this case it really could be."

Mr. Sickles rolled his eyes. "You know, everyone says that about defense attorneys," he said, "but when they actually need one…"

"You know what I always thought was odd?" Mrs. Sickles, who had gotten her breath back, interjected. "The Jews celebrate Hanukkah, but they don't use the books of Maccabees in their Bible. We use the books of Maccabees in our Bible, but we don't celebrate Hanukkah. Now why is that?"

Mr. Sickles blinked. "Do you know, I never thought about that before," he said. "And I don't think I'm going to lose any sleep wondering about it, even now – but you're right, it does show what a funny thing life is."

"What do you mean, the Jews don't use 1 and 2 Maccabees?" said Mrs. Chiodini. "They're Old Testament, aren't they?"

"Deutero-canonical," said Mrs. Sickles. "They're part of that chunk that the Jerusalem rabbis took out because it sounded too Christian, and then Luther took out again because it sounded too Catholic."

"Ah." Mrs. Chiodini rolled her eyes. "Say no more. I'd forgotten that the Jews did that, too."

"So did Shakespeare, apparently," said Mrs. Sickles. "That's what got me thinking about it. I was watching EWTN this morning, while I was ironing; they had this historian on who thought that Shakespeare was actually one of those closet Catholics they had back then, and he mentioned how, in _The Merchant of Venice_, Shylock says something about one of the other characters being 'a Daniel come to judgment'. His point was that that had to refer to the story of Susanna, because that's the only place in Scripture where Daniel appears as a judge. And the host – I can't remember whether it was Fr. Pacwa or someone else; I'm pretty sure it was a Franciscan, anyway – he mentioned how incongruous it was for Shylock, of all characters, to make that reference."

Mr. Sickles shrugged. "Probably he was thinking the same way Mom was," he said, nodding to Mrs. Chiodini. "If it's in the Old Testament, a Jew ought to know about it. After all, it's not as though he could check with the rabbi down the street – and neither could his audience, for that matter."

Mrs. Sickles nodded gravely, and then turned and glanced quizzically at her daughter. "You're very quiet tonight, Teresa," she commented.

"Am I?" said Toloth faintly, glancing up from his plate with what he hoped looked like innocent surprise. The truth was that the conversation was simply moving too fast for his limited memory-referencing skills; in the span of perhaps three minutes, he had been presumed knowledgeable about Earth's ethnography, law, religion, history, literature, popular culture, and history again. Even a trained human-Controller, being thrust into such a milieu with only an hour's preparation, would have found the density a trifle overwhelming; for Toloth, it was a tsunami.

"Yes, you are," said Mrs. Sickles. "Usually, you'd have chimed in long before now – if only to remind me that I don't have to say _deutero-canonical_ if St. Jerome didn't mind saying _apocryphal_."

Toloth tried not to wince at that newest faggot on the fire, but it took some doing. "Sorry," he murmured. "Just not in the mood, I guess."

Mrs. Sickles frowned. "Do you feel sick?" she said.

Toloth considered. There would be some advantages to feigning an illness – he would be left alone to do his research in peace, for one thing – but, on the other hand, Teresa being ill meant Teresa not showing up at the Sharing fête the next day, and questions might then be asked about her in the wrong circles. He wanted as few Yeerks as possible to even think about Teresa Sickles for the next three days; ergo, changing her schedule for his own convenience's sake was out of the question.

He shook her head. "No, not really," he said. "Just tired."

"Mm." Mrs. Sickles pursed her lips. "Well, maybe you need to excuse yourself and go lie down for a while. I'm sure there are at least three people at this table who'd be glad to finish your meal for you."

"Oh, no, I'm fine," said Toloth hastily. The lamb and gnocchi lay only half-finished on the plate in front of him, and it would have taken more than mere bewilderment to dampen his appreciation of them.

Mrs. Sickles laughed. "I thought you might be able to find the strength for that," she said. "Well, after dinner, then. We'll give you an hour or so to rest before we barge in and start setting up your room for Nana to sleep in, all right?"

Toloth nodded vaguely. "So I'm sleeping in the den while she's here?" he said.

"I was assuming so," said Mrs. Sickles. "Unless you're going to insist on keeping your room to yourself, which you've never done before when she's visited."

Toloth would have liked to so insist, but it was plain that refusing to make this small self-sacrifice would be utterly uncharacteristic of Teresa, so he merely acquiesced quietly and speared another piece of lamb. «Your family is very gifted at making things difficult, do you know that, Teresa?» he said.

Teresa laughed. «Well, you know what they say about tangled webs.»

This time, Toloth did catch the reference. He was not amused.


	27. Pious Reading

Mrs. Sickles's suspension of her household's Advent abstinence hadn't extended to preparing a dessert, so Toloth was able to slip away to Teresa's bedroom as soon as he had finished her gnocchi. Once there, he sat down on her bed and gave her bookshelf a critical once-over, correlating each volume, as he passed her eyes over it, with what she remembered about its contents.

Beginnings were important, he knew. Start off on the wrong foot when studying an alien culture, and you could find yourself a thousand light-years from what you really wanted to know. He couldn't afford to let that happen in this case.

So: from which of the various Christian authors on the shelves could the essential secret of Christianity's appeal be most easily extracted? He dismissed the various Bibles; unlocking their mysteries, as he knew from experience, required more expertise than he possessed. (Of course, he could have used Teresa's expertise, but that would have involved letting Teresa's mind influence his own, and that he was determined not to do. He would _not_ be transformed.) The Catechism was likewise out; it was too encyclopedic, too factual. Toloth was looking, not for a series of ideas, but for the key to those ideas' collective appeal; in the back of his mind, he had a vague image of a secret handbook laying out the Church's strategy for world domination. (Had _The Way_ been on Teresa's shelf, he likely would have selected it just because of Opus Dei's reputation.)

He eventually settled on _The Imitation of Christ_. It wasn't one of the books Teresa knew very well – she had attempted to read it at the age of eight, been overwhelmed, and had never returned to it before being infested – but she knew it was considered one of the world's great spiritual manuals, and that phrase seemed hopeful enough. He rose and took the small paperback from where it sat next to _Misty of Chincoteague_, then returned to the bed and settled down to seek his gnosis.

* * *

At first, it seemed plain sailing. The book opened splendidly – just the way such a book as Toloth was seeking ought to open: _"He that followeth Me shall not walk in darkness," saith the Lord. These are the words of Christ; and they teach us how far we must imitate His life and character, if we seek true illumination, and deliverance from all blindness of heart. _And the second paragraph was even better: _His teaching surpasseth all teaching of holy men, and such as have His Spirit find therein the hidden manna… He, therefore, that will fully and with true wisdom understand the words of Christ, let him strive to conform his whole life to that mind of Christ._ The most esoteric mystery cult could hardly have put it better. All that remained was for Toloth to find out what sort of arcane knowledge the "Mind of Christ" consisted in, and then recast it so as to make it suitable for the likes of Gef and Oliss. What could be simpler?

But then the third paragraph came, and it all fell apart. Without a single word of warning, as though it flowed perfectly naturally from his previous statements, the human author began deriding the very notion that the way to please Jesus had anything to do with knowledge: _What doth it profit thee to enter into deep discussion concerning the Holy Trinity, if thou lack humility, and thus be displeasing to the Trinity? For verily it is not deep words that make a man holy and upright; it is a good life that maketh a man dear to God… If thou knewest the whole Bible, and the sayings of all the philosophers, what should all this profit thee without the love and grace of God? "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity," save to love God, and Him only to serve._

After a moment's discomposure, Toloth rallied, and rebuked himself for being so surprised. Teresa herself, after all, had emphasized to him that all the elaborate philosophy on which her religion seemed to be built was really secondary: _What we're really about is making sure that people go to Heaven. _The question was, could one persuade a poolful of _izcots_ – and an unruly Hork-Bajir host – that the path to Heaven lay through quiet obedience to the Empire and its aims?

He read on. For a while, his quest seemed hopeful, as the author spent the remainder of the short chapter, and the whole of the next, rebuking ambition in its various forms and emphasizing the feebleness and insignificance of the mortal nature. _That is the highest and most profitable lesson, when a man truly knoweth and judgeth lowly of himself_ – surely, that was a suitable thing to teach the lesser spawns? Any attempt they might make to get above themselves could then be rebuked by reminding them of their lowliness.

But then he got another check. He was in chapter 3 now, and the author was continuing his attack on intellectual pretensions, reminding his readers that acquaintance with the Eternal Word (that was Jesus, Toloth gathered) was the true source of knowledge. Which sounded very well, until, coiled up in the second paragraph like a _gilhizee_ in a _subfet_ bush, came the sentence: _No man without Him understandeth or rightly judgeth._

At first, Toloth didn't see any special significance in this; it was simply one more expression of the basic sentiment that animated the whole passage. Then, when he was halfway through the next sentence, a sudden alarm bell went off in his mind, and his gaze darted back up the page. Yes, it said _no man_ – and it said _judgeth_.

Toloth felt a chill go down his borrowed spine. For a moment, he had missed the implications of that – but he was quite sure that no _izcot_ would. If no-one could rightly judge without knowing Jesus, it followed logically that all those in positions of authority ought, ideally, to be worshippers of Jesus – and, in any case, could be held to the same standards that worshippers of Jesus held themselves to. Which meant that there would be no use in attempting to keep the rabble submissive by exhorting them to humility, since they could legitimately ask whether the Council and the Visserarchy were likewise abasing themselves in their own thoughts.

Decidedly, that aspect of the thing would have to be suppressed – but, then, that meant suppressing the whole line of thought that had seemed so promising. To remove the idea that all _sellthee _were poor, frail, and utterly dependent on Jesus was to remove the only reason Jesus's worshippers had to be humble. (Toloth did momentarily wonder whether one might not tell the _izcots_ that the Emperor was himself a manifestation of Jesus, but then he discarded the notion. In other circumstances, it might conceivably have worked, but Oliss knew perfectly well that Teresa both hated the Empire and loved Jesus. So that was no good.)

He soldiered on, hoping that the author would supply some solution to this problem. But it seemed that he was doomed to disappointment; if anything, the text got more alarming as he went on. _[L]et all creation keep silence before Thee; speak Thou alone to me_: that was hardly the sort of thing one wanted an Imperial subject saying to a human deity, or to anyone who wasn't an official mouthpiece of the Empire. _The spirit that is pure, sincere, and steadfast… doth all things to the honour of God_: how likely was it that Imperial edicts would always be concerned to honor the human God? _He is truly great who deemeth himself small, and counteth all height of honour as nothing_: by the fires of Kandrona, that condemned the Empire's entire policy at one stroke!

By the end of the third chapter, Toloth was ready to scream with frustration. What was the matter with this religion? In every respect, it was gentler, milder, and more self-sacrificing than even the most humane of non-Earthly cults, and yet its very gentleness seemed to carry the power to destroy and remake whole worlds. How could you govern people who were more concerned to serve Jesus than to satisfy any desires of their own? If you threatened to torture them unless they obeyed you, they would simply accept the torture, believing that – how had the Kempis human put it – _It is vanity to follow the desires of the flesh and be led by them, for this shall bring misery at the last. _Even if you killed them, they would prefer that to submission: _It is vanity to desire a long life, and to have little care for a good life._

Of course, not all Jesus-worshippers would necessarily show that level of conviction (though Toloth suspected that all the ones he had met that day would). But that wasn't the issue. Merely believing that he ought to have that sort of conviction made a person a risk – and how could you persuade someone who cared about Jesus not to believe it? (Particularly someone who had actually been inside Teresa Sickles's mind; one could scarcely hope to persuade Oliss that Jesus didn't demand courageous self-sacrifice.)

And, as Toloth arrived at this dismal conclusion, he heard a knock on the bedroom door, and Teresa's father poked his head in. "How are you doing, chickadee?" he said. "Feeling a little fresher now?"

Toloth forced Teresa's face into a contented smile. "Yeah, I guess so," he said.

Mr. Sickles glanced at the book in his daughter's hands, and chuckled. "Trying the _Imitation_ again, are you?" he said.

Toloth nodded. "I figured it was about time," he said.

"Well, good for you," said Mr. Sickles. "Anyway, it's time to set up the den, so grab what you'll need and come on. And bring your rosary; your mother has a special intention tonight."

* * *

**Author's note: **All quotations from the _Imitation_ are taken from the Christian Library translation.


	28. Five Decades of Community Service

As Toloth re-entered the dining room, carrying Teresa's multi-colored rosary in her right hand, he had the sensation of walking into an Andalite encampment. He wasn't quite ready to agree with Malcar Seven-Four-Five that Christianity was a living and malignant thing, but he was coming to feel that Christians, at any rate, were a hostile force. Teresa, her family, Gef, Thomas à Kempis, maybe even Jesus himself: all were arrayed against him, all desirous (whether they knew it or not) to make him into something that he had no wish to be.

Perhaps this feeling was heightened by what Teresa knew about the object he was carrying. Christians seemed to speak of the rosary in improbably violent metaphors: "the scourge of Satan", they called it, and "the weapon against the evils of the world". A week before, Toloth would have thought that ludicrous – how could one fight the evils of the world with colored beads? – but it didn't seem silly at all to Teresa. She was utterly certain that Jesus heard her when she prayed – that she could present her wishes to the Maker and Governor of the universe, and, if they proved to be good and fitting, he would adjust the very fabric of reality to accommodate them. And she knew, also, that, in order for her wishes to be acceptable, she had to be acceptable herself; therefore, it was natural that the most powerful prayers should occur while her mind was fixed on edifying things. Hence the three series of "mysteries" taken from the life and actions of Jesus, which, by definition, were as edifying as anything could ever be. It was all horribly rational and compelling, when seen – as Toloth was now seeing it – from the inside.

"So what's the intention, Mom?" he said with an effort.

Mrs. Sickles sighed. "Your Aunt Missy called this afternoon, just before Nana arrived," she said. "Jasmine was arrested this morning for shoplifting."

Mr. Sickles's head jerked up. "What?" he said. "You didn't tell me anything about this."

"Not before dinner, no," said his wife, with a faintly ironic smile. "I put a lot of work into this meal; the last thing I wanted was for it to get cold while you analyzed the possibilities of the case."

"What were the circumstances?" said Mr. Sickles. "Could felonious intent be demonstrated? Stores are pretty busy this time of year; it's easy to pick something up and then forget to put it back down."

"Yes," Mrs. Sickles agreed, "but it's not so easy to pick it up, tear off the tag so the sensors can't detect it, and then stuff it in your purse and leave the store."

"Is that what Jasmine did?" said Mr. Sickles, aghast. "In the middle of the Christmas rush, she thought she could get away with a stunt like that? I know she has her clueless moments, but I would have expected her to have a little more common sense than that, at least."

Mrs. Sickles shrugged. "Well, when you raise a girl to think that the world already belongs to her, things like this happen, I suppose," she said. "I don't like to speak ill of your sister, but you have to admit that she did rather spare the rod where Jasmine was concerned."

"I suppose so," Mr. Sickles conceded. "Still, it's a shame that it had to happen now, of all times of the year."

"I agree," said Mrs. Sickles. "And that's why I told Missy that we'd say a Rosary for her and her family tonight after dinner. Now, let's all sit down and get to it, shall we?"

* * *

And so the session began. Mr. Sickles led it, as he had led the ritual of thanks at the beginning of the meal; the three women present (or, rather, two women and one human-Controller) confined themselves to joining in the latter portions of the prayers he recited.

Toloth, of course, had picked the basic plan of the thing from Teresa's brain before coming downstairs. After beginning with a statement of basic Christian beliefs (a more precise version, in statement form, of what Teresa had asked of Gef before she had baptized him), three prayers were recited: an act of praise and petition to Jesus's divine father; a slightly less grand such act, repeated three times, to his human mother (who seemed to have some particular importance in the Christian scheme of things); and a brief statement to the effect that God was glorious and worthy of all possible honor. After this, the leader announced an event in the life of Jesus, and all the participants were supposed to reflect on the significance of this event for as long as it took the leader to say the three prayers again, repeating the prayer to Jesus's mother ten times instead of three. This was then repeated for four more such events, which, along with the first, were supposed to express either the joy, the sorrow, or the glory of Jesus's life and deeds. (Toloth gathered that, since it was the third day of the week, the Sickles family would be focusing on that series of events that expressed the sorrow.) Then a few unofficial concluding prayers were recited, and that was that. It was, Toloth had had to admit to himself, a pleasingly precise and orderly structure; what he hadn't quite understood, through the carefully filtered memories that were all he was allowing himself, was the emotional effect it seemed to have on the participants.

But now, as his human fingers traveled along the chain of smooth, round beads, and the familiar phrases (familiar to Teresa, anyway) fell off his borrowed lips with barely conscious effort, he began to see. It was a liberating thing, in its way, this Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary: by providing the hands and the tongue with more or less automatic exercises, it freed the mind to act in its own sphere, without hindrance from the body. For creatures as sensual as humans, some such trick was probably necessary, if they were to pay any attention at all to the unseen and unimaginable powers behind the universe. This Saint Dominic had been a shrewd man; it was a shame he hadn't been born a Yeerk.

"Give us this day our daily bread," he murmured, in precise imitation of Teresa's unconscious inflections, "and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but…"

«…deliver us from evil.»

Toloth was momentarily startled to hear Teresa's mental "voice" gain such sudden intensity. He had been aware that she was following along with the Rosary from inside her psychic oubliette, but he hadn't been paying her much attention. Now, hearing her "speak" the last four words of the Pater Noster with such passion, he was almost amused. _Beg your God all you want, Teresa,_ he thought. _Your deliverance will not be coming anytime soon._

But then he realized that that wasn't what Teresa was asking for. The undertones of her thought were perfectly plain, and they took the "us" quite literally. "Deliver _us_ from evil" – that is, the two persons occupying my body. Deliver me, certainly, from the evil that has robbed me of my freedom, my privacy, and my happiness – but also, and more importantly, deliver my Controller from the evil that has ruled his heart from the day of his spawning. Let him not die in the thrall of that evil; let him not choose to follow it rather than You; let it not lead him forever away from the endless peace and joy for which You made him. Deliver us, O Lord.

The impact that this made on Toloth can hardly be overstated. He had already seen several dramatic examples of the effect of Christian love, but that was nothing compared to the glimpse he now got of the thing itself. Teresa loved him. She hated the Empire, but she loved him. Indeed, she hated the Empire all the more because she loved him – because to love someone means to desire his good, and the Empire could only remove goodness from Toloth, never give it to him. Toloth was meant to be something of which the Empire had no conception – something of which Toloth himself, as a subject of the Empire, had no conception. And Teresa, with every fiber of her being, wanted him to be that. That was what she meant by love.

But did Toloth want that sort of love? And, in particular, did he want it from a human? That, he now realized, was the question – the unavoidable question that anyone who infested Teresa Sickles had to face. Malcar Seven-Four-Five had said no; Oliss Three-Eight-Three, it seemed, had said yes; and he himself – well, he simply and terrifyingly wasn't sure. In one sense, it seemed logically impossible not to want it; how could he reject someone's desire to see him prosper? By definition, if Teresa's love remained true to itself, it could do him nothing but good. But, then, if to love was to do good, then to accept Teresa's love was to acknowledge her as his benefactor – and benefactors were owed repayment. All civilized beings understood that, even the Taxxons. If someone saved your life, you owed him that life; if someone did you a favor, you owed him a favor in return (Toloth thought of Lissim); if someone loved you… well, presumably you owed her love. And how, Toloth asked himself, could he owe Teresa love and still live as he had always done?

While he pondered this, the Sickleses – Teresa included – continued with their meditations. They contemplated Jesus's fear and distress as his death had approached, the whipping he had received at the hands of another Empire's soldiers, the mockery that those soldiers had made of his claim to universal kingship, and the final indignity that had forced him to carry the instrument of his own execution to its place of erection. And, as they contemplated these things, Teresa wove them all effortlessly into her plea for Toloth's soul. _You went through so much to redeem us, _ran the tenor of her thoughts. _Don't let it all go for nothing in his case._

Then, when her father announced "the Fifth Sorrowful Mystery, the Crucifixion", Toloth felt Teresa's mind give a sort of guilty start, as she realized that the Rosary was nearly finished, and that she had barely spared a thought for her cousin's predicament. As she hastened to reorient her intentions, her memory rebuked her with other occasions of this sort; it was, it seemed, a characteristic failing of Teresa's, this neglect of what was expected of her when private considerations intervened. She remembered, in particular, a time when, as a fourth-grader, she had deliberately missed the school bus so she could bring a gift to the man who had saved Chris – then only a puppy – from being hit by a car.

Toloth was unsure whether he appreciated being thus compared to the savior of that hideous brute he had met outside. He let the matter slide, however, and the rest of the rosary proceeded without incident; beads clicked, prayers were uttered, and Yeerk soldier and human child each pursued his own thoughts, until the session concluded with a plea that all those present might imitate the events that they had just contemplated, and thereby attain the promise that was implicit in those events. Then, with a symbolic gesture that traced the shape of Jesus's death on their own bodies, the four free agents at the table rose, put away their tools of prayer, and resumed the more mundane tasks of life.

"You've cleared a path to your bed, right, Teresa?" said Mrs. Sickles. "Nana isn't going to trip and kill herself if she has to get up in the night?"

"I think it's okay," said Toloth.

Mrs. Sickles raised an eyebrow. "You _think_ so?"

"Um… maybe I should go back and check."

"You do that," said Mrs. Sickles. "And, Clarence, I told Missy you'd call her after we prayed, so you should probably do that before they go to bed. Mama and I can keep ourselves entertained for an hour or so while the two of you look for loopholes in the petty-theft laws."

And so, within minutes, every member of the Sickles household was busy with the same sort of things that any unbelieving family of similar size and conditions might have been busy with. There was nothing, externally, to hint that, just minutes before, they had been soliciting the attention of a limitless, self-existent Being of unimaginable power and glory.

But the mind of Toloth Two-Nine-Four, as he returned to Teresa's bedroom, was filled with strange thoughts indeed.


	29. More Abundant Comeliness

Teresa's bedroom did not, in fact, require much straightening in order to be a presentable sleeping area for her grandmother. This was largely due to Malcar's influence; left to her own devices, Teresa would have let all manner of clutter accumulate on her floor, but Yeerks, for all their weaknesses, are not a people that readily embrace disorder. (This, it may be mentioned in passing, was one of the Sharing's great strengths among parents of teenagers; the Sickleses were not the only couple to notice their child becoming quietly but noticeably tidier after achieving Inner membership.)

Consequently, after replacing a few books on their shelves and tossing various articles of clothing into the laundry basket, Toloth was free to change into a nightgown, leave the room, and settle himself in the Sickles family's den. This, as he had seen while helping Teresa's father set it up for the night, was a cozy and comforting room, filled with books (as many rooms and minds in the Sickles household seemed to be) and miscellaneous curios, with a time-worn teal sofa against the north wall that concealed a folding bed beneath its cushions. All the same, he was reluctant to take up residence there; once he did, he knew, he would be spending the rest of the night alone with his thoughts and _The Imitation of Christ_.

To delay this outcome, he lingered as long as possible over Teresa's undressing. This, however, came with its own form of peril – as a more experienced human-Controller might have known, but Toloth, having only infested a Gedd and a Hork-Bajir, was still an innocent where clothing was concerned. He had noticed, of course, that humans invariably decorated their bodies with elaborate coverings of woven fibers, but this had left no particular impression on his mind except that human ideas of decoration left a great deal to be desired. Nor had Teresa's thoughts on the custom heightened his respect for it; when she thought of clothing at all, it was as an expression of modesty and femininity, both of which concerns Toloth found insipid. Why should humans, who already had a wide and unmistakable array of sexual indicators, feel the need to emphasize their differentiation with clothing? And as for discouraging the mating impulse, it seemed to Toloth that, if a male human were in the mood to mate, a few millimeters of fabric would make little difference to a female's eligibility.

What he hadn't expected to discover, as he slowly and painstakingly removed Teresa's socks, skirt, cardigan, and camisole, was that the human custom of vesture, whatever one thought of its formal purposes, gave a definite and remarkable mystique to the human body itself. With each garment that fell away, Toloth had the queer sensation that he was digging to the heart of a secret, as though the body beneath all this fabric was of so delicate a dignity that it couldn't be lightly exposed to the harsh, indifferent light of day. It reminded him of something Prince Seerow was said to have told his wife: «The Emperor doesn't conceal himself because he fears attack. He conceals himself because that's the only way that a mere individual can maintain the reverence due an Emperor.»

It was absurd, of course. On Esiln Kalkat, he had seen this very body with no coverings at all, and nothing about it had suggested a member of nature's royalty. If it felt different from inside, that was merely an indication of how dramatically cultural conditioning could shape a creature's emotions. For that was all it was – a mere host emotion, of no more importance than the Hork-Bajir battle-urge. It had caught him off guard, that was all. It was nothing worth getting excited about.

And yet… he couldn't help thinking of the Baibul passage he had read, that night in the Bug fighter. Something about the first humans, after they had transgressed, knowing themselves to be "revealed", and making coverings for themselves out of leaves. He had vaguely thought of camouflage at the time (not bothering, in his haste to get to the parts about Jesus, to read the long, rambling, typically Skrit-Na footnote to the verse), but now he realized what it had really meant. Clearly, the human who had told that story had also felt this obscure, reverential shame in human nakedness, and had traced it back to the moment when, in his cosmology, the human body had ceased to be the deathless thing it had been made to be. Only a myth, doubtless – but, still, it was rather unnerving how one kept finding sound observations mixed with even the most fantastic notions of the Jesus-worshippers.

And there was another thing to consider. Why was it only the humans that had this custom? Why did the Skrit Na, for instance, not wear clothes? If it came to practical considerations, their bodies were just as poorly equipped for cold weather or harsh treatment, yet they had never developed a rule of continual covering. Why should the human body be singled out for such reverence?

Without thinking, Toloth went over to Teresa's closet, and gazed at his host body in the full-length mirror on the closet door. Yes, it was just as he remembered it from Esiln Kalkat: small, rounded, pink, plain, strictly utilitarian. The Arn, with their biological dilettantism, would have found it prosaic in the extreme – yet this was the form that six billion _sellthee _rigorously hid from each other, lest it grow too mundane a sight.

Perhaps the secret lay in the generative organs. Those seemed to be particularly carefully concealed – and Toloth remembered what Teresa had said, three days before, about the human fixation on sexual intercourse. He lowered the small, pale-pink garment that still lay about Teresa's loins, and examined critically the thing it had covered.

As he did so, he felt Teresa's mind flinch beneath his own, but this he ignored. Teresa was irrelevant now; what mattered was unearthing the secret of this human peculiarity. Teresa herself, it was plain, didn't know what the secret was; perhaps no human now alive did. But the essence of the thing still had to be discoverable, if one only probed deeply enough into the body that was its focal point.

He continued to gaze at the organ he had uncovered. Like the rest of Teresa's body, it was, in appearance, nothing special: a mere opening for the young to pass through, just like that of his old Gedd body except for the lack of a protective sphincter. But that was to be expected; Teresa was, after all, a female, and it was the essence of the female role to take into oneself what the male provided. Externals counted for little or nothing in such a case: what mattered, inevitably, lay within.

He extended two fingers on Teresa's right hand, and drew the hand towards her thigh…

«_Don't!_»

Teresa's desperate, reflexive cry thrust itself like a dagger into the midst of Toloth's reverie, and a sudden flood of her memories burst unbidden upon his consciousness. They were memories of Malcar Seven-Four-Five, on occasions when she deemed her host's spirit to be insufficiently abject, forcing Teresa's body to perform actions that, by Teresa's belief, were not merely evil, but so vile and degrading as to be practically unmentionable.

It was as though a spell had been broken. Toloth jerked Teresa's hand away like one who touches acid, and looked around the room in a sort of daze. What had he been thinking of all this time? What did it matter to him why humans wore clothes? And how in the galaxy had he expected to find the answer through an untoward inspection of Teresa's reproductive organs?

With a sudden wave of nausea, he realized what he had been about to do. There was a certain class of Yeerk unmentionables – _flakthee_ was the most polite name – who took macabre delight in misdirecting the functions of their host bodies. They would cause the wrinkles of their Gedd skin to grow in grotesque knots and loops, and cut off their Taxxon legs for the mere pleasure of wiggling the tender stumps that grew in their place. (Distortion of Hork-Bajir bodies was less common, mostly because such Yeerks rarely got promoted to Hork-Bajir level.) Toloth had always held them in utter contempt, considering them little better than witless animals; now he realized that, had it not been for Teresa's intervention, he would at that moment have been taking the first step toward becoming one of them.

He shuddered, pulled up Teresa's underwear, and reached hastily into the closet for her nightgown. As he threw it over her body, he told himself firmly that it was all right, that this incident couldn't be considered characteristic of him; it was merely an abnormal reaction to his undeniably abnormal circumstances, and therefore perfectly normal.

A small part of him, though, suggested that this begged the question. Was it not possible – though he had never considered it before – that the _flakthee_ themselves had begun in much the same way: that they had not emerged from their parents' corpses already corrupted, but had merely developed abnormal habits in response to their own abnormal experiences? Was there, perhaps, a dark schoolmaster in the mind of every _sellith_, who was merely waiting for the right opportunity to teach even the proudest Yeerk the vilest of practices?

With an effort, he thrust the thought from his mind. _Flakthee_ were one thing, and he was another; he would not indulge in wild fantasies about a court of absolute law before which he and they were one. To be sure, the incident proved something, but it wasn't that all sentient beings were equally subject to corruption; it was merely that he needed to get a grip on himself before the strain of living as Teresa drove him to a nervous breakdown.

The problem, he reflected, was that he had allowed his premonition at the door too much significance. He had spent the past few hours, against all common sense, attempting to avoid contact with his host's mind as much as possible – carefully filtering her thoughts, leaving large sections of her memories unprobed, even reacting with horror to the notion that she desired his good – all out of a mere superstitious fear that, if he let Teresa's mind influence his, he would be somehow "transformed". But it was beginning to look as though that very tactic of evasion, by leaving him vulnerable to surprise emotional cross-currents such as the one he had just experienced, was what was likely to transform him – and quite deleteriously, at that. It was high time, he decided, that he started treating Teresa Sickles as a host like any other; as soon as he was settled into the den for the night, he would make a thorough and detailed inspection of her entire mind, as he would already have done for any other creature of which he was the temporary master.

And having thus resolved, he felt his confidence and self-respect begin to revive for the first time in more days than he cared to contemplate. With a deep, satisfied breath, he tossed back Teresa's head, squared her shoulders, and headed with a brisk, Yeerkly stride toward the nocturnal resting-place that her father had prepared for him.


	30. Though I Be Nothing

"All set, honey?" said Mrs. Sickles. "Do you want the light left on so you can read for a little bit?"

Toloth shook Teresa's head. "No, thanks, Mom," he said. "Like I said, I'm pretty tired – and there's the fête tomorrow, too."

Mrs. Sickles nodded. "All right, then," she said. "Sleep tight, angel."

"You too, Mom."

Mrs. Sickles switched off the lamp and slipped out of the room, plunging it into darkness as she shut the door behind her. Toloth rolled over, buried Teresa's face in the pillow, and listened for a moment to the sounds of a human house at night – the sloshing of water in the pipes, the occasional car driving past outside, the voice of Teresa's father as he continued his phone conversation with his sister – Chris's barking, Mrs. Chiodini's shuffling footsteps, and the gentle pulsing of his own host's heart.

A renewed sense of the strangeness of his situation came over him. Here he was, a soldier of the Yeerk Imperial Army, the apple of the Sub-Visser's eye who administered Earth's Sulp Niar pool, committing half a dozen capital crimes at once so he could peek into the mind of an utterly unimportant human girl. Objectively considered, he was probably in greater danger than any Yeerk of his spawn had ever been – and yet, somehow, he felt safer and more at peace than he ever had in his life.

Partly, he reflected, this was no doubt because of the emotional influence of Teresa's mind. She was exactly where she belonged, and knew it, and that sense of belonging was so strong that anyone who touched her mind couldn't help but be affected by it. But there was more to it than that. He wasn't merely feeling Teresa's sense of belonging; he was feeling as though _he_ belonged, and, for the life of him, he didn't know why.

Or, rather, he did. He belonged in Teresa's house because Teresa welcomed him there – cautiously but definitely welcomed him, as she had never welcomed Malcar. And she welcomed him – him, a Yeerk, the sworn enemy of her race – because, in some strange way, she had assurance that his heart was true. The phrase was ludicrous, but Toloth could find no better description of the state of Teresa's consciousness. She still didn't know his purpose in infesting her, but she had intuited, somehow or other, that she needn't regret being used in the way that he wanted to use her. (And this, of course, fed into the overwhelming sense of relief and ease that had been illuminating her mind all afternoon. To know that her body's every movement wasn't motivated by hatred of all that she held dear was, to Teresa, a rare and precious thing.)

So he was welcomed. He had come as an invader, and Teresa, by her faith, had made him something like a guest. And this was a new experience to him, for, in the Yeerk Empire, nobody was a guest. Hospitality, the taking of another person into one's own life, was not among the Yeerk virtues.

It was, perhaps, significant that, faced with this particular contrast between life in the Empire and life with Teresa Sickles, Toloth did not firmly remind himself that humans were lesser and Yeerks greater. He merely did what he had resolved to do some minutes before: he put his host's consciousness to sleep with a swift depression of the appropriate neurons, and then commanded her memories to appear before him, that he might find out who this person was that called herself Teresa Sickles.

* * *

The substance of what he found has, of course, been preserved in the Vita that he submitted to the Congregation of Saints shortly after Teresa's cause was opened. But that text – written by a Yeerk ex-soldier of no great literary gifts, to satisfy a group of Vatican bureaucrats – gives little sense of what it was like for Toloth to truly meet the girl who had so beguiled and bewildered him for so many feeding cycles.

He saw her earliest, jumbled memories of childhood, when the cars on the street outside were still exotic jungle beasts, and the shadows in her bedroom concealed soul-stealing monstrosities. He saw her later childhood, with all its usual milestones: first day at school, first Communion – and, somewhat later, first genuine religious experience. He saw the pall cast on her pre-teen years by the conflicts that tore apart her father's law firm, forcing her family to economize drastically while he reestablished himself on his own, and the consequent emotional insecurity that had rendered her uncharacteristically vulnerable to the Sharing's blandishments. And, of course, he saw all the wretchedness and sorrow that had made up her teenage years as an involuntary host.

What most surprised him, however, was not what he saw, but what he didn't see. There was one element that he had casually assumed would be in Teresa's mind – had assumed so casually, in fact, that he hadn't even been aware of making the assumption – and his inability to find it unnerved him perhaps more deeply than anything else had hitherto done.

It was, in a word, exceptionalism. Here was a creature who had changed Gef Makkil's whole outlook on life with a word, who had roused the Sulp Niar pool's _izcot_ population to the point where official measures had to be taken, and who had driven at least two host-bearing Yeerks – himself and Malcar Seven-Four-Five – to extremes of behavior utterly incompatible with true Yeerkish dignity. Surely, such a creature concealed some mysterious greatness beneath her unassuming bipedal form.

But no. The mind of Teresa Sickles, when observed directly, proved to be stunningly ordinary. She was perceptive, but not overly cunning; though intelligent and well-read for her age, she was hardly a great scholar; and, far from possessing the emotional coolness and self-sufficiency that, to a Yeerk, was the true measure of a great soul, she was as filled with violently conflicting passions and dependences as any other teen-aged human female. In fact, the only thing that obviously distinguished her from any of a dozen of her peers was the intensity of her devotion to Jesus.

But how could mere devotion to an imaginary deity have such effects? Even if a human called Jesus really had lived some two millennia before, he could only be a human like any other – a mere phenomenon of nature, transfigured and distorted by the sentient mind's perverse need to put a face on the unknowable. The Kandrona, the Hork-Bajir's Deep, and a thousand other natural phenomena had received the same treatment – and then their hierophants, having scratched that psychic itch, had gone on and done what they had been going to do anyway. Religion, in the long run, was just one more appetite, to be satisfied and then forgotten about until the next time it struck; to make it the guiding principle of one's life was idiotic and craven.

And yet… whatever faults she might have, Teresa was clearly neither a craven nor an idiot – and neither, by Hork-Bajir standards, was Gef. If their religion was an appetite, it was an appetite that was disciplined and restrained by its own object – as though Kandrona particles themselves could keep one from absorbing too many of them. Which was absurd, unless… well, unless the object was real, and living, and personal, and actively concerned for the welfare of those who hungered after it.

Toloth sighed, and ran a weary hand over Teresa's brow. Nonsense, all of it. The strangeness of his surroundings was getting to him again; it was making the universe seem more mysterious and incalculable than it really was. The truth of the matter, no doubt, was that Christianity was precisely the minor human superstition that common sense would have it, and that any power that Teresa seemed to draw from it was, in fact, merely a reflection of the greatness of other Christians. For, after all, there had to be some primal greatness in Christianity at its origins; so long as the lesser Christians continued to derive strength from that greatness, the superstition could remain powerful indefinitely.

_Can it, now?_ said a mocking voice inside his head. _Does anything remain powerful indefinitely? Do not all powers, and especially the power to move hearts, fade and dwindle as the centuries pass? Even the Empire, ancient though it is, is truly a succession of Empires; go back five generations, and see how much kinship you have with the Yeerks of that time. Yet this human girl calls herself sister to creatures four times as ancient._

And this was true. When Simon Cephas and Paul of Tarsus had been working to "build the Kingdom" on Earth, it had been Generation 657 on the Yeerk homeworld, and Saxol Five-Three-Five had been setting the Empire aflame – literally, in some places – with accusations that the Council had desecrated the great athletic tournament known as Bastinekk. Now it was Generation 686, and the very idea of Bastinekk was a joke among Saxol's own descendants – and Teresa Sickles was still busy building.

But, then, might Christianity not also be a series of Christianities? Perhaps the myth of the executed God was the only real continuity, and, beneath that surface, the specific teachings were continually being altered to fit the needs of the moment, just as the form of the Council had been retained while a hundred different theories of government had come and gone.

It was an attractive idea, but, when Toloth looked for evidence of it in Teresa's knowledge, he found himself coming up worse than empty. There were, indeed, groups of Christians who believed in thus altering the content of their religion while retaining its forms – but it was precisely these Christian groups that were unable to preserve this world-altering devotion in their members. Indeed, it seemed that Teresa's own sect had, a few decades before, formally committed itself to updating certain of its rituals and practices, and, insofar as this had been interpreted as a license to alter the sect's historic teaching, it had dramatically weakened the fundamental commitment to Jesus; if it hadn't been for the zeal of their current high priest, who seemed to interpret the update precisely as an opportunity to communicate ancient ideas to modern humans, it was likely enough that Teresa's missionary impulse would have died of malnutrition long before her capture. (Toloth, whose life would have been much simpler had this in fact happened, took a moment at this point to curse the name of John Paul II.) It seemed, in general, that Christianity, so far from being a shrewdly adaptive survivor among religions, could only summon the will to survive by refusing to adapt – by being faithful, in the face of all logic, to the obscure enthusiasm of a few long-dead Jews. And, when it was thus faithful, it not only survived, but prevailed.

"Ridiculous," Toloth muttered aloud. "There must be a trick somewhere."

"How's that, Teresa?" came Mr. Sickles's voice from the other side of the door.

Toloth jumped; he hadn't realized that anyone was near enough to hear him. "Um, nothing, Dad," he said, struggling to make Teresa's functionally-asleep tongue form clear syllables. "Just talking to myself."

"Well, try telling yourself that it's time to be asleep," said Mr. Sickles. "I was just telling your aunt how exhausted you were; are you going to make me into a liar by staying up till midnight holding a one-girl symposium?"

"Uh… no," said Toloth, now completely wrong-footed. "No, I… I'm… no, I'm not."

Mr. Sickles chuckled. "Well, all right, then," he said, and walked away from the door again. Toloth could hear him talking on the telephone as he left: "No, I'm still here, Missy. Just had to get in my daily dose of offspring-needling. –No, I don't think it does, actually. From what I've seen, I'd say Teresa's growing up as well-adjusted as anyone could ask for. And frankly, I'm not sure that you have a whole lot of room to talk, under the circumstances…"

His voice faded into the distance, and Toloth let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. Yes, clearly it was time to be asleep – or a-_dulot_, anyway. It had been an exceptionally long day, and a bit of unthinking semi-awareness was just what he needed to refresh his mind. Doubtless, in the clear light of morning, all these absurd fancies would be dispelled, and he would be able to get on properly with the business of unraveling Teresa's secret.

The mocking internal voice laughed outright at that. _Her secret? _it said. _Come now, Toloth Two-Nine-Four. The girl is your host; she can have no secrets from you. If you don't understand her yet, it is because you do not wish to._

But Toloth ignored this. With a single contortion of his lower body, he detached himself from all but the most automatic areas of host control, and surrendered himself to _dulot_. As he did so, he got one last glimpse of Teresa's consciousness, and noted with amusement that she was dreaming of being in a steam-filled laboratory, confronted with three bottles of colored seltzer that would turn her into a Taxxon if she drank from them in the wrong order.

_These poor humans,_ he thought. _When they fall unconscious, not only do they not escape their thoughts, but they become the hopeless thralls of their most absurd and confused imaginings. How fortunate I am to be a Yeerk._

And, as he thought this, the torpor of _dulot_ caught up with him, and he slid into that state where there are no dreams.


	31. The Light of Morning

The reason that there are no dreams in _dulot_, of course, is because Yeerk physiology, being substantially simpler than the human, requires a less intensive restorative process. It is not necessary for a Yeerk to ever become unconscious of his (or his host's) surroundings, only that they should in no way engage his mind. _Dulot_ is thus a state, not of oblivion and dreams, but of total – even heightened – awareness, combined with utter and complete indifference; the senses continue to notice, and memory continues to record, but the emotions are as incapable of response as a fly in amber is of motion. (It is, perhaps, the experience of this state, and its natural association in the Yeerk mind with health and refreshment, that so disposes Yeerks toward callousness and cruelty, just as the austere strength of Andalite bodies disposes that race toward pride.)

Thus, as for eight hours the stars of California's winter sky passed over the roof of the Sickles house, Toloth lay below that roof like a stone god on a mountaintop, observing all and caring for nothing. To be sure, he was lying in a dark room with his host's eyes closed, and therefore observed less than he might have; still, humans have four senses besides sight, and the brain of a _dulotel_ Yeerk can do a great deal with them. By the time that Toloth woke (so to call it) the following morning, all the sounds, feelings, and even smells of the past night had found a place in the archives of his mind; moreover, those of Teresa's memories that had borne on one or the other of these sensations – which was to say, in the long run, nearly all of Teresa's memories – had been sorted through and organized much more effectively than his untrained conscious mind could ever have done. The net effect was to give Toloth vastly more confidence in his ability to impersonate Teresa; it was as though a rank amateur of an actress had managed to learn all of Bette Davis's tricks overnight. (It will be seen how useful a quality _dulot_ was to the Yeerk race, quite apart from its restorative powers.)

Toloth had expected it, of course; he had experienced it before with his first _dulot_ in Gef, and before that with his original Gedd host. Nonetheless, when he arose from his stupor and perceived his newfound mastery of human-Control, he felt a sense of elation that went beyond anything he had been prepared for. Perhaps it was the different circumstances – being in the host's more or less natural surroundings; perhaps it was the feeling that the hardest part was over, and that the rest of his imposture would be comparatively easy. Or perhaps, as he later said to Thraqa, it was simply the natural result of having, in some degree, understood the mind of Teresa Sickles. In any case, it was a welcome feeling.

He gave Teresa's consciousness a rousing nudge, and felt her mind stir beneath his palps in response. A series of almost automatic thoughts, evidently a morning routine, went through it: an anguished flinch at the prospect of another day's bondage; a pang of self-pity because her God hadn't seen fit to let her die during the night; then, as her will reasserted itself, a stern rebuke to this latter feeling, and a resolve to bear whatever sufferings the day might bring in the same spirit in which Jesus had borne his protracted suffocation. (And, on this particular morning, there also, after a second or two, came the memory of what had happened the previous day, and the thought of spending two whole days out of Malcar's reach. The resulting surge of happiness gave her mind a kind of beauty that loyal Imperial subjects rarely got to see in their hosts.)

But Toloth ignored all this. What mattered to him was that, as Teresa's mind awoke, so did her body; its heartbeat quickened, its breathing deepened, and the strength that it had laid aside for the night swiftly returned to its every member. To a Yeerk, it is always heartening to feel a host body regain its full usefulness – and all the more so if one has just learned how to really use it.

He opened Teresa's eyes, blinking a little at the sunlight, and scraped a few bits of lachrymal debris from her tear ducts. He stretched her arms, let out a little half-yawn, half-groan, and rose from the bed; he slid her feet into cranberry-colored slippers, wrapped her body in a matching bathrobe, and headed for the bathroom to take care of certain pressing needs involving her bladder. All this he did almost automatically, as being the natural and obviously correct things for Teresa to do – and all of it he did with a fierce delight, simply because it was so automatic and natural.

_I have achieved it,_ he thought with wonder. _I am a human-Controller. The Sub-Visser did not choose me to be one, but I am one, nonetheless._

He smiled internally, beginning to feel quite pleased with himself. Who said, after all, that he was weak-willed or impotent? (In fact, of course, nobody had said anything like this during the past few weeks, but it still gave him pleasure to mentally rebut the accusation.) He had taken one of the Empire's prized luxury items from under its rightful owner's palps, and he had made it his own. Who before him had ever done anything of the sort? (Besides Ishlok of the Hills, that was.)

He was positively beaming with self-satisfaction by the time he reached the bathroom door. _Look to yourself, Malcar Seven-Four-Five,_ he thought as he turned the brass knob and pushed the door open. _Your last claim to superiority is taken away. Before, you could say, "After all, I am still a human-Controller; the Empire has placed me at the forefront of the invasion, and has given me privileges denied to Toloth Two-Nine-Three." But now Toloth Two-Nine-Three has seized those privileges, not through Imperial favor but through his own strength and cunning. Have you ever done the like? It is to…_

A sudden, sharp cry interrupted his reverie, and he glanced up to see Mrs. Sickles, seated on the toilet with her undergarments around her ankles, and staring up at him with something like shock. "Really, Teresa!" she exclaimed. "Do we not believe in knocking in this household anymore? Or at least checking to see whether the light is on before we come barging in?"

"Oops," said Toloth, feeling Teresa's cheeks grow warm with a sudden influx of blood. "Sorry, Mom."

He shut the door again hastily; then he leaned back against the wall, folded Teresa's arms, and stared fixedly at the ceiling, trying his best to ignore the irrepressible giggling coming from Teresa's higher-thought centers.

* * *

It seemed to him a remarkably long time before he heard the sound of the toilet being flushed, and even longer before Mrs. Sickles finally emerged. That, to be sure, was natural enough, since she was notoriously fastidious in hygienic matters – as Toloth, of course, had no trouble recalling from Teresa's memories. (Somehow, this instance of his newfound mastery over her mental resources was less satisfying to him than the others had been.) Still, it was irksome.

And it was even more irksome when Mrs. Sickles, upon emerging from the bathroom, bestowed a kind, maternal smile on him. "I'm sorry if I was harsh with you just now, darling," she said. "But really, I thought I'd raised you better than that."

Toloth shook his host's head. "No, it's okay, Mom," he said. "It was my fault, I should have looked. Just had my head in the clouds, I guess."

"Mm," said Mrs. Sickles. "Well, there's nothing new about that, of course." She sighed, and shook her head. "Honestly, I don't know how you're going to manage when you have children of your own."

_That's not going to be an issue, my dear human, _Toloth thought. _By the time your daughter is ready to mate, neither she nor any other member of her race will be in a position to take active roles in the rearing of their young. _

Outwardly, however, no trace of this thought crossed his borrowed face as he shrugged and said, "Well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it."

"Yes, I suppose so," said Mrs. Sickles. "Heaven knows, I was far from ready at your age, too. Anyway –" she gestured "– there's the bathroom you wanted so badly."

Toloth felt Teresa's cheeks beginning to redden again, and cursed the relative pallor of her skin that made this so conspicuous. "Um, yeah," he said. "Thanks, Mom."

Hastily, he slipped past his host's broadly smiling mother into the bathroom, and shut the door behind him. Then, as he seated himself on the white-porcelain latrine and began to discharge the night's accumulation of waste water, a passage he had read the evening before drifted into his mind: _If it seemeth to thee that thou knowest many things, and understandest them well, know also that there are many more things which thou knowest not. Be not high-minded, but rather confess thy ignorance._

He scowled, but acknowledged the appositeness of the reflection. It hadn't really been a question of ignorance, of course; he had known perfectly well that humans in general, and Teresa's mother in particular, didn't appreciate being walked in on while they were eliminating. But that it was "high-mindedness" – pride in his knowledge, in other words – that had brought about his little humiliation, he could scarcely deny.

The thought rather disturbed him. He had never thought of the _Imitation_ as being addressed to him; his only concern had been whether it could be taken as being addressed to the _izcots_. Yet here was a rather unsubtle indication that its counsel was much more broadly applicable – and, it might be, well worth acting on.

But he couldn't afford to worry about that now. In a few short hours, he would be thrust into the thick of the Sharing's biggest promotional event of the season; what he had to focus on was how to handle a community center's worth of veteran human-Controllers, many of whom knew Malcar Seven-Four-Five personally, without giving any of them any reason to think that some other Yeerk was looking out from behind Teresa's eyes. And he hardly thought that a long-dead human monk could give him much advice in that regard.

With that thought, he tore off a length of Charmin Basic and wiped away the residual water from Teresa's pubic area (gingerly – the memory was still tender of the last time he had handled this region of her). Then he rose, flushed, and, after a cursory cleaning of Teresa's hands, headed to the dining room to fortify the two of them for the coming ordeal.


End file.
